A cyber attack is spreading across the Ukraine and parts of Europe, with airports, government departments and firms reporting problems.
“As a result of cyber attacks, these banks have difficulties with customer service and banking operations. The National Bank bank is confident that the banking infrastructure’s defence against cyber fraud is properly set up and attempted cyber attacks on banks’ IT systems will be neutralised.” a statement said.
The hack comes just a few weeks after the WannaCry cyber attack, which spread across 150 countries and affected parts of the NHS. Whilst it is unclear who is responsible for the hack today, it is thought by many UK and US analysts that the WannaCry hack in May was carried out by North Korea.
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’s central bank, which has also been affected, said in a statement: “The National Bank of Ukraine has warned banks… about an external hacker attack on the websites of some Ukrainian banks… which was carried out today,”
Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at Surrey University, said: “It appears to be a variant of a piece of ransomware that emerged last year. It was updated earlier in 2017 by the criminals when certain aspects were defeated. The ransomware was called Petya and the updated version Petrwap.”
The cyber attack was not contained in the Ukraine. Throughout Tuesday afternoon, companies in Russia, Spain and France have also been affected.
A powerful hacking attack has been carried out against the company’s servers,” said Russian oil giant Rosneft said on Twitter, adding that it “hopes” the incident was “not connected to current legal proceedings”.