Information Center

Central Cyberspace Office: Extortion virus is still spreading but the speed has slowed down

  

Since May 12, worm malicious code spreading attacks based on Windows network sharing protocol has broken out worldwide. More than 100 countries, including the United States, Russia and the entire Europe, as well as China's domestic university intranet, large enterprise intranet and government agency intranet, have been recruited. On the 15th, the reporter interviewed the head of the Network Security Coordination Bureau of the Central Cyberspace Office about the "worm" type ransomware attack.

 Viruses

According to the person in charge, since May 12, a ransomware software has spread around the world, infecting many fields, including hospitals, education, energy, communications, manufacturing, and government departments. Computers in some industries and government departments in China have also been affected, causing some impact.

After the incident, relevant departments such as the public security, industry and information technology, education, banks, and online information all made arrangements immediately and put forward requirements for prevention. Qihoo 360, Tencent, An Tian, Jinshan Security, An Heng, Yuanwang and other related enterprises quickly carried out research and actively provided security services and prevention tools. Various relevant media have made a lot of reports, which have played an important role in improving the awareness of prevention of the whole society and curbing blackmail software. At present, the blackmail software is still spreading, but the speed of transmission has slowed down significantly.

The person in charge said that the practice of dealing with the blackmail software in the past few days showed that the most effective response for users was to install security protection software and upgrade security patches in a timely manner. Even intranet computers not directly connected to the Internet should also consider installing and upgrading security patches. As system management technicians of the unit, they can also take measures such as closing the ports and network services used by the ransomware.

The large-scale spread of ransomware was rare in recent years, which once again sounded an alarm bell for people. The rapid development of information technology, such as the Internet, not only brings great benefits to people, but also brings unprecedented network security challenges. The person in charge suggested that all parties should attach great importance to network security issues, install security protection software in a timely manner, upgrade the security patches of the operating system and various applications in a timely manner, set high security strength passwords and replace them regularly, do not download and install application software of unknown origin, and take backup measures for particularly important data.