GoldenEye is no longer just known as Pierce Brosnan’s best James Bond movie. The GoldenEye strain of the Petya ransomware was designed to wipe out tons of data from Ukrainian companies. The Ukraine’s SBU security service says it found evidence suggesting that Russian government-sponsored hackers were involved.
In its statement, the SBU claims it obtained data with international antivirus companies that led it to conclude that the same hackers were also involved in the attacks, which [shut down Ukraine’s power grids] using Telebots and BlackEnergy in December 2016.
“This proves the involvement of the Russian special services in this attack,” SBU concluded.
This new strain of Petya ransomware dubbed GoldenEye, comes almost two months after WannaCrytook down more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries. The Russian hackers who were allegedly involved, inflicted a little more chaos than they originally intended. Instead of just striking the Ukraine, the virus ended up affecting companies throughout Europe and even all the way in Australia.
Richard A. Clarke, the former National Coordinator for Security Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism for the United States, has a slightly different opinion about the Petya/GoldenEye ransomware attack and had this to say:
“This was a pretend ransomware attack. So it pretended to be ransomware. Send us $300 in bitcoin and we will give you your computer back. Actually, what it was doing was erasing all the files permanently on all those computers. It was Russia, they were attacking Ukraine and it slipped and got out of Ukraine. It was just supposed to attack Ukraine and wipe out all the files.”
Clarke has worked in the Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. He also believes we haven’t heard the last from of these hackers. “They will be back.”
