Ukrainian police have arrested and detained an individual accused of spreading the Petya malware that was used in a massive global cyber attack in June.
According to a report in ZDNet, a business technology news website, "An unnamed 51-year-old from the southern city of Nikopol was detained by the state cyber police earlier this week after a raid was carried out at the alleged attacker's home." However, according to the report, it's not clear if the person who was arrested has been declared a formal suspect.
In a brief statement that was translated by ZDNet, police said that they seized computers that were used to spread the malware in the cyberattack. The statement also said that the arrested individual told police he had uploaded the malware to a file sharing account and shared a link on his blog with instructions on how to launch the malware. In total, the malware was downloaded about 400 times, police said, per the statement.
In all, the global malware incident was said to have affected multinational companies in least 65 countries. As Healthcare Informatics has reported since news of the attack broke, Heritage Valley Health Systems, based in Beaver, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, Mass.-based vendor Nuance both confirmed early on that they were impacted by the global attack. It was then reported that researchers believed that Petya, or NotPetya as some call it, was not a ransomware attack after all, and that victims should not pay the ransom as they will not be able to restore or decrypt their files.
Over the July 4 weekend, Heritage Valley Health System was able to get its systems all restored, but the healthcare business of Nuance was still being affected. It wasn't until late July that Nuance said it was able to restore service to the majority of its clients on its flagship transcription platform. More than 500,000 clinicians and 10,000 healthcare facilities worldwide use Nuance's clinical documentation solutions.
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