Updated on Saturday, July 1st, 2017

A paralyzing cyber attack has now been reported at major firms throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. According to this online article in the Telegraph, the virus spread quickly from Ukraine with Russia’s Rosneft oil company and Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk both falling victim to the hack.

This new malware attacks a victim’s hard drive quickly with advanced data scrambling code. Infected machines will not have access to the Master Boot Record (MBR) once the virus, utilizing #EternalBlue (a code developed in secret by the United States National Security Agency), is executed on a vulnerable machine.

The exploit within the Windows OS software has been patched by Microsoft (in March), but as the WannaCry attacks have previously demonstrated, thousands of organizations around the world have failed to properly install the fix.

Although first appearing to be a new strain of the Petya virus from 2016, complete assessment of this new malware reveals a more devastating compilation of code that seeks to reformat a PC’s EFI partition, rendering the infected machine utterly useless.

Kaspersky Labs analysis of the compiled code revealed that digital extortion was not the end goal of those who are responsible for this malicious deployment. Due to the scope of the attack and obfuscation utilized, This threat was most likely  state sponsored cyber-warfare hidden behind the facade of ransom-ware. Even if the email address associated with the ransom demand’s bitcoin address, there does not appear to be any method provided within the coding to actually de-crypt any lost data from an infected machine.

Here is a list of the affected organization compiled from sources around the globe:

Cadbury Candies (AU)

DLA Piper Law Firm (US)

Evraz Steel (RU)

Heritage Valley Health Systems (US)

Home Credit Bank (RU)

Kiev Metro Systems (UA)

Maersk Shipping (NL)

Merck Pharmaceuticals (US)

Metro Group Wholesale Foods (DE)

Rosneft Energy (RU)

Russian Central Bank (RU)

Saint Gobain Construction Materials (FR)

Ukrainian Central Bank & Power Grid (UA)

WPP Advertising Agency (UK)