The effects of Ukraine’s cyber attack are still being felt throughout the country, with corporate offices, factories and shipping ports reporting poor quarterly results.
The June 27 attack, which was dubbed NotPetya, hit Ukraine and spread across Eastern Europe affecting many government agencies, businesses and corporate networks.
The maker of Nivea cosmetics, Beiersdorf AG (ETR:BEI), suffered major delays in shipping and production after its computers froze. The German consumer products maker blamed NotPetya for a decrease in the half-year financial results.
Another six major international companies, which acknowledged disruption from the cyber attack, are due to report quarterly results later in August.
Beiersdorf said that €35 million (£31.29 million) of their second-quarter sales were delayed to the company’s third quarter. This was due to the need to calculate the costs of the attack, promotions and using other production sites to make up for the shortfalls.
“It is very important to stress there is a cost and there will be a cost associated with this,” said Chief Financial Officer Jesper Andersen. “We are still working our way through it. Our focus so far has been on recovery.”
The cyber attack had a widespread impact, affecting government as well as corporate computers. The Deputy Prime Minister, Rozenko Pavlo, said on Twitter that he was unable to access government computers.
“We also have a network down. This image is being displayed by all computers of the government.” he wrote, attaching a photo of his computer with a message claiming a disk “contains errors and needs to be prepared”, urging the user not to turn it off.
Ukraine accused Russia to be behind the attack.
“The available data, including those obtained in cooperation with international antivirus companies, give us reason to believe that the same hacking groups are involved in the attacks, which in December 2016 attacked the financial system, transport and energy facilities of Ukraine using TeleBots and BlackEnergy,” said Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, in a statement.
“This testifies to the involvement of the special services of Russian Federation in this attack.”