No Report of Petya or Goldeneye Computer Virus in Indonesia, Yet: IT Ministry
Jakarta. Indonesians, including major companies in the country, are advised to take precautions against a possibly imminent global cyber-attack, the Communications and Informatics Ministry warned on Wednesday (28/06).
"The government continues to keep track of and try to prevent the spread of the Petya [computer] virus in Indonesia," Communications and Informatics Minister Rudiantara said in a statement on Wednesday (28/06).
Companies and individuals are advised to backup their data in a separate storage immediately as the full-blown impact of the virus may be felt in the country as soon as next week.
So far, there has been no report of the virus in Indonesia, possibly because most offices are still closed for the week-long Idul Fitri holiday.
Alfons Tanujaya, an expert with local computer security firm Vaksinkom, said the Petya virus — variants of which include the NotPetya or GoldenEye viruses — could prove to be more damaging than last month's WannaCry "ransomware" attack since Petya is able to extract an administrator's password and use it to infect other computers in a network.
"I fear that since we're in the middle of a long Idul Fitri holiday, many IT admins at major companies are still on leave. There might be no one overseeing their computer network," Alfons said.
The ministry advises disconnecting LAN and backing up data using Live Operating System run from a compact disc or a USB drive if the computer is off.
The Indonesia Security Incidents Response Team on Internet Infrastructure (ID-Sirtii) suspects the Petya virus works in a similar way to the Wannacry ransomware virus that attacked computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system automatically, using the LAN network or online through e-mails.
Just as it happened with Wannacry in May, the hackers that have unleashed Petya to the world are also demanding $300 in Bitcoin to restore access to an infected computer's data.
Microsoft says Petya is a more sophisticated version of a malware found in 2016 under the same name, hence the other name NotPetya.
"We saw the first infections in Ukraine, where more than 12,500 machines encountered the threat," Microsoft says in a blog post.
"We then observed infections in another 64 countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Russia and the United States."
Microsoft says it released updates and automatically delivered them to all free Microsoft antimalware products, including Windows Defender Antivirus and Microsoft Security Essentials. The antimalware is free to download here.
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