Malaysian media group, Media Prima under Ransomware ATTACK

As Reported!

In the past week, the largest Malaysia's media company, Media Prima was under a ransomware attack.

The ransomware sealed the email network of the company and urged for 1,000 Bitcoins, which is nearly $6,000,000 in return to restore the encrypted data.

However, the ransomware behind this attack is still a mystery, and the affected have flagged a red signal declining to pay the ransom.

Media Prima is responsible for various radio stations, newspapers, and TV stations.

It controls New Straits Times, Harian Metro, One FM, Hot FM, TV9, TV3, and many others.

Also, the media company controls and covers the sector of advertising and home shopping, so there’s no surprise that it had all the eyes on it.

Relief: Only the email system was infected!

The main operations carried by the Media Prima company was not affected as the ransomware attack was limited to its email network.

The only target that failed to dodge the damage was their email system.

However, the company’s authority decided not to pay the demanded ransom and transferred their email system to a G Suite.

The company officials said “Our office emails were affected, but we then migrated to G Suite. The attackers demanded bitcoins, but we decide not to pay them."

Although no traces are revealing about the data exposure, also the possibility is certainly little.

Due to the standard principle of ransomware, such cyber-attacks do not expose any information as their primary objective is to encrypt the sensitive data and make it inaccessible and demand a ransom to revive the data.

Also Read: Why WannaCry ransomware is still a threat to your PC

However, the ransom requested by unknown ransomware was relatively high– victims were asked to pay 1000 BTC.

In fact, one bitcoin equals to $6,297.21, that sums up the amount to $6.29 million.

However, the most significant attack implemented by WannaCry ransomware remains to be against NHS (National Health Service) in England and Scotland.

According to security reports, 70,000 medical devices were compromised and cost almost $128 million.

On the other hand, the NHS was not the only one affected in this attack, but the list of victims also include many famous companies like Renault, Telefonica, Deutsche Bahn, Nissan, FedEx, and many others.

The attack altogether costed a staggering $4 billion of damage.

In June 2017, the Petya ransomware initiated a huge ransomware campaign on Merck, Maersk, DLA Piper, Mondelez,  Ukraine government, banks, power utilities, and other important plants.

The attack was severe and looted almost $300 million whereas Merck alone lost $135 million.

The main factor while trying to prevent ransomware is to pay close attention to the emails you receive. Note that cybercriminals tend to drop phishing messages with infected attachments randomly on networks and servers.

And when people access them, they become an easy target of hackers.

The only thing you could do is avoid opening any suspicious-looking content in email box.

Eventually, you must delete the mail. Always stay careful because a spam message might fall into the inbox section too.

Tips to Prevent virus and malware from Infecting Your System: