WannaCry's Korean cousin hits LG service centers

The cyber world is slowly recovering from some major ransomware attacks in the past few months. However, a new ransomware attack has happened in South Korea, which has been traced back to the lethal WannaCry ransomware — a malware that shattered the organisations of the world.

A report from The Korea Herald states that LG had reported to the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) about a ransomware attack on one of their service centres in Korea. Since the attack was in its nascent stage, the agency managed to prevent the ransomware spreading to a larger network.

However, what came as a thing to worry about is that the ransomware was identical to the WannaCry ransomware. “We found that samples of the malicious code (found in LG’s kiosks) were identical to the WannaCry ransomware attack. More investigation is still needed to determine the exact cause,” KISA said.

The WannaCry codes could have been uploaded to one of the LG kiosks, which were then expected to spread to other systems in the network and corrupt the data. However, timely diagnosis prevented it to make an issue as large as the ones it did in the May of this year.

This incident lays emphasis on running an updated version of the software and utilising the latest cyber security tools to protect precious data as harmful codes like these are still out in the large, waiting for an opportunity to strike the right chord.