Bank of China ATMs Go Dark As Ransomware Attack Cripples China

In the aftermath of the global WannaCry ransomware attack, which has spread around the globe like wildfire, a significant number of corporations and public services have found their infrastructure grinding to a halt, unable to operate with unprotected if mission-critical computers taken offline indefinitely. Some of the more prominent examples so far include:

• NHS: The British public health service - the world's fifth-largest employer, with 1.7 million staff - was badly hit, with interior minister Amber Rudd saying around 45 facilities were affected. Several were forced to cancel or delay treatment for patients.
• Germany's Deutsche Bahn national railway operator was affected, with information screens and ticket machines hit. Travelers tweeted pictures of hijacked departure boards showing the ransom demand instead of train times. But the company insisted that trains were running as normal.
• Renault: The French automobile giant was hit, forcing it to halt production at sites in France and its factory in Slovenia as part of measures to stop the spread of the virus.
• FedEx: The US package delivery group acknowledged it had been hit by malware and said it was "implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible." .
• Russian banks, ministries, railways: Russia's central bank was targeted, along with several government ministries and the railway system. The interior ministry said 1,000 of its computers were hit by a virus. Officials played down the incident, saying the attacks had been contained.
• Telefonica: The Spanish telephone giant said it was attacked but "the infected equipment is under control and being reinstalled," said Chema Alonso, the head of the company's cyber security unit and a former hacker.
• Sandvik: Computers handling both administration and production were hit in a number of countries where the company operates, with some production forced to stop. "In some cases the effects were small, in others they were a little larger," Head of External Communications Par Altan said.

One place which seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the global cyber-havoc (aside from the US, which is ironic as it is the U.S. NSA that was created the hacking software) has been China. Or so it seemed due to lack of media reports from the mainland. Now, courtesy of 95cn.org, and its twitter account, we have the first visual evidence that China too was materially impacted, to the point where not only local ATMs had been taken offline, but Chinese traffic police, immigration authorities and various public security bureaus and schools have suspended normal work until the malware threat is ...Read More HERE