A major global cyber attack on Tuesday disrupted computers at Russia's biggest oil company, Ukrainian banks and multinational firms with a virus similar to the ransom-ware that last month infected more than 300,000 computers.
The rapidly spreading cyber extortion campaign underscored growing concerns that businesses have failed to secure their networks from increasingly aggressive hackers, who have shown they are capable of shutting down critical infrastructure and crippling corporate and government networks.
It included code known as "Eternal Blue," which cyber security experts widely believe was stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and was also used in last month's ransomware attack, named "WannaCry."
"Cyber attacks can simply destroy us," said Kevin Johnson, chief executive of cyber security firm Secure Ideas. "Companies are just not doing what they are supposed to do to fix the problem."
Russia and Ukraine were most affected by the thousands of attacks, according to security software maker Kaspersky Lab, with other victims spread across countries including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United States.
Security experts said they expected the impact to be smaller than WannaCry since many computers had been patched with Windows updates in the wake of WannaCry last month to protect them against attacks using Eternal Blue code.
Researchers said the attack may have borrowed malware code used in earlier ransom-ware campaigns known as "Petya" and "GoldenEye."
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