Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Among Thousands Affected By Latest Mass Cyber Attack

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is among the sites hit by a new malicious data-scrambling cyber attack which has hit government, businesses, banks and airports across Europe and the UK. 

Affected users have been blocked from accessing their computer's files or hard drives, and told to pay a ransom in bitcoin to a designated account. 

Trouble is, some people have reported saying they've paid the amount requested but still have no access to their systems. 

A dedicated team have been working to contain the situation at Chernobyl. The plant's shift director has told a Ukranian newspaper there is no radiation threat.

He said that a radiation leak was avoided due to "excess levels of control" at the plant but staff have had to manually monitor radiation levels, because they can't access the metrics on their computers.

The Ukraine's deputy Prime Minister has even shared pics of the government system, declaring the government's headquarters have been shut down. 

While the attack has been dubbed 'Petya' or 'Golden Eye' by many, cyber researchers at Kaspersky have labelled the wave 'Not Petya' or 'ExPetr", ruling it's not a variant of the Petya ransomware we have seen before. 

The attack appears to be spreading using the EternalBlue vulnerability in Microsoft Windows -cripppling systems in the same way the WannaCry ransomware did last month.

Within a day of being released, WannaCry had infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries.