Nissan says British plant hit by cyber attack

By REUTERS | 15 May 2017


LONDON: Nissan's plant in Sunderland, northeast England, has been affected by a cyber attack that has hit over 150 countries, a spokesman for the Japanese carmaker said on Saturday.

"Like many organisations around the world, some Nissan entities were recently targeted by a ransomware attack. Our teams are responding accordingly and there has been no major impact on our business," he said in a statement.

He said the situation at the plant, which employs 7,000, continued to be monitored.

On Friday, cyber extortionists tricked victims into opening malicious malware attachments to spam emails that appeared to contain invoices, job offers, security warnings and other legitimate files.

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The attack disrupted Britain's health system and companies including carmaker Renault and global shipper FedEx.

Renault, meanwhile, said it expects to be able to resume normal production today, said a spokesman. "Nearly all plants should be able to resume their activity tomorrow."

Renault said on Saturday that it had stopped production at several sites to prevent the spread of the cyber attack that hit its computer systems the previous day.

Microsoft on Sunday pinned blame on the US government for not disclosing more software vulnerabilities.

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Cyber security experts said the spread of the worm dubbed WannaCry - "ransomware" that locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries - had slowed but that the respite might only be brief amid fears new versions of the worm will strike.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft president Brad Smith appeared to tacitly acknowledge what researchers had already widely concluded: The ransomware attack leveraged a hacking tool, built by the US National Security Agency, that leaked online in April.

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