WannaCry is a form of "ransomware" that locks up the files on your computer and encrypts them in a way that you can not access them anymore.
What about computer security at large?
Ransomware is a program that gets into your computer, either by clicking on the wrong thing or downloading the wrong thing, and then it holds something you need to ransom.
"One of the rules in Russia is that Russian criminals are not allowed to hack Russian targets", Lewis said.
Kyodo News said one personal computer was affected at one office at East Japan Railway Co., but train services were not affected.
Director Shin Dae Kyu at the state-run Korea Internet & Security Agency who monitors the private sector said Monday that five companies have reported they were targeted by a global "ransomware" cyberattack. The WannaCry ransomware uses the EternalBlue exploit, along with the DoublePulsar backdoor to compromise the data on a system. The spread of the current attack was stopped by an anonymous United Kingdom cybersecurity researcher, who discovered that by registering an unusual domain name that had been written into the ransomware he could get the virus to shut itself down.
"When any technique is shown to be effective, there are nearly always copycats", said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer of McAfee, a security company in Santa Clara, California. But the researcher cautioned that the hackers could find a way around this. "Until this weekend's attack, Microsoft declined to officially confirm this, as US Gov refused to confirm or deny this was their exploit", wrote NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a tweet. That move, which cost just $10.69, redirected the attacks to the server of Kryptos Logic, the security company where he works. But they could still linger as low-grade infections that flare up from time to time.
Conficker was more of a pest and didn't do major damage.
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Thousands of users on Friday received the message "Ooops, your important files are encrypted" along with messages from the hackers who encrypt computer files so they can't be accessed and threaten to delete them unless a ransom of up to $300 or more in Bitcoins is paid.
The damage might have been temporarily contained.
On top of that, copycat versions of the malicious software have already started to spread. Other experts found his claim credible.
Australians may have avoided the worst of the weekend's massive WannaCry ransomware attack, which hit over 200,000 users and disabled businesses around the world over the weekend, but experts are warning that businesses that don't double down on their cybersecurity defences may be T-boned as the first-generation 'kill switch' weakness is fixed and new variants of the ransomware worm are unleashed into the wild.
The UK government called a meeting of its crisis response committee, known as Cobra, to discuss how to handle the situation.
Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organizations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too hard to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said. "Part of what an organization needs to understand and assess is what those two risks are".
Security officials in Britain urged organizations to protect themselves by installing the security fixes, running antivirus software and backing up data elsewhere.
The indiscriminate attack began Friday and struck banks, hospitals and government agencies, exploiting known vulnerabilities in older Microsoft computer operating systems. But many corporations don't automatically update their systems because Windows updates can screw up their legacy software programs.
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