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A global cyberattack spread to thousands of computers on Monday as workers logged in at the start of a new workweek. Hospitals, businesses,universities, and daily life were disrupted, but no catastrophic breakdowns were reported. In Europe, where everything started with the reports of cyber attacks, officials said it appeared that a second wave — based on copycat variants of the original malicious software — had not yet ended.
The disruptions were most noticable in Asia, where many workers had already left on Friday when the attack broke out. China alone reported cyber attacks and disruptions at nearly 40,000 organizations, including about 4,000 academic institutions, figures that experts say are most likely to be low estimates, given the prevalence of pirated software there. Affected institutions includes two of China’s most important institutions of higher education, Tsinghua and Peking Universities; a movie theater chain in South Korea; and blue-chip companies in Japan. The cyberattack has attacked 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries. The malicious software has been transmitted by email. This software or malware locks users out of their computers, threatening to destroy data if a money is not paid. The ransomware continued to attack through politics and markets on Monday. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed the United States, since the malicious software used in the attack had originally been developed by the National Security Agency, which then was stolen and released by an elite hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers.
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Less than a week into the Trump administration, Sally Q. Yates, attorney general, hurried to the White House with a warning. The president’s national security adviser, she said, had lied to the vice president about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
“We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible,” Ms. Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday. “To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.” President Trump did not immediately fire the adviser, Michael T. Flynn, over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Mr. Flynn remained in office for 18 more days. Only after the news was public he lost his job on Feb. 13. Ms. Yates’s testimony, along with a separate revelation Monday that President Barack Obama had warned Mr. Trump not to hire Mr. Flynn, offered a more complete public account of Mr. Flynn’s stunning fall from one of the nation’s most important security posts. It also brought doubts about Mr. Trump’s judgment in keeping Mr. Flynn in place despite serious Justice Department concerns. White House officials have not fully explained why they waited so long. “I don’t have any way of knowing what, if anything, they did,” Ms. Yates said. “If nothing was done, then certainly that would be concerning.” At the heart of Monday’s testimony were Mr. Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. Mr. Flynn denied that they had talked about American sanctions, an assertion was brought back by Vice President Mike Pence and the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. But senior F.B.I. and Justice Department officials knew otherwise. Mr. Kislyak, like many foreign diplomats, was under surveillance, and his conversations with Mr. Flynn were recorded, officials have said. Investigators knew that Mr. Flynn had, in fact, discussed sanctions. |
Emilio Coppola
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May 2017
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