Further, they have also warned organizations, businesses and other sectors to take required precautions and update their systems. The company believes the problems are related to the ransomware attack, although no ransom is being demanded.
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said US investigators are collecting forensic information - such as internet addresses, samples of malware or information the culprits might have inadvertently left on computers - that could be matched with the handiwork of known hackers. "Microsoft can't be proud". Hackers know this fact and thus have launched the first of what is expected to be numerous attacks arising from the now publicized NSA tools.
Furthermore, he says that perhaps the most startling component of the attack is that so many companies were simply crippled.
An unprecedented global cyber attack that infected computers in at least 150 countries beginning on Friday has unleashed a new wave of criticism of the US National Security Agency.
"An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen".
"The cybercrime market is really innovative", he added, "and they are quick to take advantage of vulnerabilities". The $967-million (U.S.) PureFunds ISE Cyber Security ETF, jumped 3.3 per cent, the most in six months.
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It's hard to blame Microsoft, Litan said, since it issued fixes and generally did what it should. That dump included a vulnerability codenamed EternalBlue, which preys on a flaw in Microsoft Word to transmit malicious software from one Windows Computer to another. If you're still using Windows XP, you're out of luck, but the March and April update bundles are available for Windows Vista.
Industrial conglomerate Hitachi Ltd. said the attack had affected its systems at some point over the weekend, leaving them unable to receive and send emails or open attachments in some cases. So investigators can follow the transactions until an anonymous account matches with a real person, said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer with the California security company McAfee. But it wasn't Shadow Brokers who were directly involved in the ransomware strike.
"It does seems as if US higher ed was not badly hit by this attack, and reports from other information-sharing organizations indicate that USA sectors [and] regions may have been able to mitigate the threats and contain damage", Kim Milford, executive director of REN-ISAC (short for the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center), said in an email. "An operating system can be reinstalled, but you can't recover pictures of your children from when they were six".
"It's not rocket science", Litan said. Asked what the company is doing to prevent such exploitations, he cited "basic IT security blocking and tackling". He said the software attacking a vulnerability had been incorporated with other software and delivered in a way to cause "infection, encryption and locking". While Microsoft patched the vulnerability pretty quickly after the release, many clients have not run the updates needed to deploy the latest patch.
In the USA, where the effects haven't appeared to be widespread, investigators believe additional companies have been attacked but have not yet come forward to report it, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
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