Cyberattack may not have been meant to get money

The dramatic data-scrambling attack that hit computers around the world appears to be contained.

But with the damage and disruption still coming into focus, security experts worry the sudden explosion of malicious software may have been more sinister than a criminally minded shakedown of computer users.

"There may be a more nefarious motive behind the attack," Gavin O'Gorman, an investigator with US antivirus firm Symantec, said in a blog post.

"Perhaps this attack was never intended to make money (but) rather to simply disrupt a large number of Ukrainian organisations."

The rogue programme initially appeared to be ransomware, a fast-growing and lucrative breed of malicious software that encrypts its victims' data and holds it hostage until a payment is made.
 

But O'Gorman was one of several researchers who noted that any criminals would have had difficulty monetizing the epidemic given that they appear to have relied on a single email address that was blocked almost immediately and a single Bitcoin wallet that, to date, has collected the relatively puny sum of USD 10,000.

Others, such as Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, said that clues in the code suggest the program's authors would have been incapable of decrypting the data in any case, adding further evidence that the ransom demands were a smoke screen.

The timing was intriguing too: the malware explosion came the same day as the assassination of a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer and a day before a national holiday celebrating a new constitution signed after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Ransomware or not, computer specialists worldwide were still wrestling with its consequences, with varying degrees of success.

Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk, one of the global companies hardest hit by the malware, said Thursday that most of its terminals are now operational, though some terminals are "operating slower than usual or with limited functionality."

Problems have been reported across the shippers' global business, from Mobile, Alabama, to Mumbai in India. When The Associated Press visited the latter city's Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust on Thursday, for example, it witnessed several hundred containers piled up at just two yards, out of more than a dozen yards surrounding the port.

"The vessels are coming, the ships are coming, but they are not able to take the container because all the systems are down," trading and clearing agent Rajeshree Verma told the AP.

"The port authorities, they are not able to reply (to) us. The shipping companies they also don't know what to do. ... We are actually in a fix because of all this.