The hackers responsible for the latest international cyber attack, identified as Petya, have reportedly moved the ransom accumulated in bitcoins on Tuesday night, several publications reported.
Virtual currency, estimated to be around £7,900 (approximately Rs 6.62 lakh) has been emptied out of the original account, BBC reported. Reports of messages demanding more bitcoins to unlock targeted systems have also surfaced.
Experts suspect the ransom transfer is an attempt to throw a spanner into investigations.
The hackers have demanded 100 Bitcoin worth $2,56,000 (approximately Rs 1.66 crore), Forbes reported. “Send me 100 Bitcoins and you will get my private key to decrypt any harddisk [except boot disks],” the magazine reported.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government said its experts had thwarted a second attack on systems in their country. The eastern European nation was the first to report the Petya attack on June 27. Ukraine’s interior minister said its officials had seized computer servers believed to have been made vulnerable to the Petya-variant virus, BBC reported.
Some of the biggest corporations including Russia’s largest oil company Rosneft, Ukraine’s international airport, shipping firm AP Moller-Maersk, and advertising giant WPP fell prey to the Petya cyber attack, which comes just a month after the WannaCry ransomware attack that affected systems in over 100 countries.
Petya builds a list of IP addresses to spread to, including addresses on Local Area Networks as well as remote IPs, Symantec said. Once the list of target computers has been identified, Petya builds a list of user names and passwords it can use to spread to those targets.
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