- Apr 26, 2017
- 89
Just days after infecting the cyber infrastructure of Honda Automobile giant in Japan the WannaCry ransomware attack has now infected 55 traffic cameras in Victoria, Australia.
In a statement released by the Victorian Department of Justice, cameras installed on highways and intersections across the state have been infected by the malware.
When it comes to fixing the problem the department said that a patch has already been released to tackle the infection from spreading any further. As for the infected cameras, they would be fixed “in the next couple of days”.
However, it’s not all good news as 3AW, a talkback radio station based in Melbourne reports that the WannaCry ransomware infection was discovered earlier in June but only brought into road safety camera commissioner’s notice after being reported by the radio station earlier today.
The WannaCry malware infection kicked off last month when United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) had its computers infected. After a couple of days, the ransomware infected as many as 200,000 users in 150 countries including post offices, bus stations, hospitals, universities and telecommunication companies, etc.
In Spain, the country’s largest telecommunications company Telefónica had its server infected while in Russia the state-run post office came under attack. The malware not only targeted computers but also the medical devices in the United States.
All this was possible because of a group of hackers called Shadow Brokers who leaked NSA’s hacking tools which were then used by an unknown group of cybercriminals to carry out WannaCry ransomware attack after exploiting Server Message Block (SMB) protocol vulnerability in old Windows operating systems including Windows 7.
