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THE RADIATION MONITORING system at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear site has been taken offline after a massive global cyberattack, forcing employees to use hand-held counters to measure levels, officials have said.
“Due to the cyberattack, the website of the Chernobyl nuclear plant is not working,” Ukraine’s exclusion zone agency, which oversees the Soviet plant that exploded in 1986 and is now surrounded by an uninhabited contaminated zone, said.
“Due to the temporary shutdown of the Windows system, the radiation monitoring of the industrial area is being done manually,” the agency said on its website.
“That means that our measurers go out with hand-held meters on the Chernobyl plant like it was decades ago,” a spokeswoman for the agency, Olena Kovalchuk, told AFP.
The plant’s destroyed reactor was enclosed in a huge metal structure last year in a bid to stop radiation leaks at the site, where more than 200 tonnes of uranium remains.
Ukraine’s exclusion zone agency said Chernobyl’s “technological systems are working as usual” and that radiation control is “without delays”.
Russia and US
The cyberattacks began in Russia and Ukraine, wreaking havoc on government and corporate computer systems before spreading to western Europe and across the Atlantic.
Several multinational companies said they were targeted, including US pharmaceutical giant Merck, Russian state oil giant Rosneft, British advertising giant WPP and the French industrial group Saint-Gobain.
The first reports of trouble came from Ukrainian banks, Kiev’s main airport and Rosneft, in a major incident reminiscent of the recent WannaCry virus.
Some IT experts identified the virus as Petrwrap, a modified version of the Petya ransomware that hit last year and demanded money from victims in exchange for the return of their data.
However, global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab said: “Our preliminary findings suggest that it is not a variant of Petya ransomware as publicly reported, but a new ransomware that has not been seen before,” which it named ‘NotPetya’.
The cyberattack also recalled a ransomware outbreak last month that hit more than 150 countries and a total of more than 200,000 victims with the WannaCry ransomware.
‘Spreading round the world’
The virus is “spreading around the world, a large number of countries are affected,” Costin Raiu, a researcher at the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, said in a Twitter post.
In the United States, Merck was hit as was New York law firm of DLA Piper.
“It seems to be done by professionals criminals, and I think money is the motivation,” Sean Sullivan, a researcher at the Finnish cybersecurity group F-Secure, said.
He said that unlike the recent WannaCry attack, this attack has sophisticated elements that could make it easier to rapidly infect many more systems.
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Makes a change from landlords robbing people I guess.
@Jurga Moylan: running a business wasn’t considered robbing the last time I checked.
@Sean: if your “business” is overcharging people for a place to live then you’re only technically not committing robbery
@Jurga Moylan: I don’t rob my tenants. I rent them a place to live and subsequently pay the mortgage and the tax man. Nothing left for me
@Charlie: not much point in doing it then is there?
@Charlie: except that eventually the tenants will eventually have paid for the property for you. Nothing wrong with that, but there is something in it for you.
@Charlie: Same here Charlie. There seems to be a view that all landlords are unscrupulous Fagin types who bleed their tenants dry. My tenants are renting at €300 a month below market value, as were the tenants before them. It’s the government’s fault for not building enough social housing over the past 20 years, not mine nor yours.
@Michael Burke: Not everyone wants to buy their own house. Landlords provide a service. Your beef is with the government, not with private citizens.
@Sean: the imbecile didn’t own the properties so he robbed unsuspecting individuals of their monies. That’s robbery, not a business!
@Pat Butler: the business he is referring to is the landlord, who it is implied is doing the robbing first
@Karl Harvey: why do you assume it is over charging? Market rates are market rates: simple demand and offer at play. We surely agree the state should do more about affordable housing but it is a legitimate enterprise to buy properties and to let them. There are also businesses that employe people to maintain those properties…
@Michael Burke: yeah it’s a 30 year investment
@Johnny 5: I’ve worked all over the world for the past 25 years as have thousands of Irish like me.
There is a need for rental long and short term rental as staying in hotels for more than 3 or 4 weeks does not appeal to the vast majority.
Council estates and projects are very often atrocious locations for rearing kids.
@Charlie: oh ye, why bother so?
Obviously missing something here.
How would the alleged scam work
How could you get rent for property you don’t own
Surely a tenant pays someone and if they dont pay the real landlord comes after them
Would have been cheaper for the gardai just to repay the €260 grand, a 2 year gardai investigation probably cost more.
It’s being done everywhere on a smaller scale in most instances. I rented a house when I lived in Bath, UK. I rented out 3 rooms and it paid for itself. I never profited from it, all bills were split and landlord was happy she got her rent on time every month. Speaking to others in similar circumstances most did the same.
They are brilliant at these scams
@Maurice Dodd: Who?
have your say