Jordan takes measures to prevent cyber attack spillover — official

AMMAN — Jordan has taken several measures to prevent any damage after an unprecedented global cyber attack that wreaked havoc in more than 100 countries, a government official said Sunday.

"Jordan is closely following up on the issue and there is intensive cooperation between the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology and the National  Information Technology Centre to take precautionary measures to prevent any harm," Nader Thneibat, secretary general of the ICT ministry, told The Jordan Times Sunday.

The ministry, he said, started issuing messages to public agencies and civil servants outlining ways to deal with such attacks, especially via e-mails.

He added that the ministry was following up on the cyber attack and on all software targeting it.

The pace of the unprecedented attack by a destructive virus dubbed ‘‘WannaCry’’ slowed down late on Friday, Reuters reported.

Symantec predicted that infections so far would cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly from cleaning corporate networks. Companies rushed to protect Windows systems with patches that Microsoft released last month and on Friday. 

WannaCry exploited a vulnerability to spread itself across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday, according to the news agency.

Code for exploiting that bug, which is known as ‘‘Eternal Blue’’, was released on the Internet in March by a hacking group known as the “Shadow Brokers”. The group claimed it was stolen from a repository of the US National Security Agency hacking tools. 

The identity of the Shadow Brokers is not known, though many security researchers believe they are based in Russia, which is a major source of ransomware and was one of the countries hit first and hardest by WannaCry, according to Reuters.