Irish businesses are ‘sitting ducks’ for cyber attacks
Chief executive of Cork-based IT company Smarttech, Ronan Murphy said it was a matter of time before a similar incident such as the WannaCry ransomware attack, which targeted many thousands of Microsoft computers worldwide last month, happened again.
The former chair of the non-profit it@cork European Tech Cluster movement in Cork predicted a similar incident would bring computers down worldwide “in the next couple of weeks”. He said: “It is like when a tsunami hits and the water is sucked back out into the ocean. People standing on the beach thinking it’s over don’t see the danger until a bigger wave comes back to devastate the whole place. We are all currently standing on the beach, oblivious to what is about to happen.” WannaCry affected 230,000 computers globally, including the UK’s National Health Service and Spain’s Telefonica, while companies were hit by ransom demands. Files on infected computers were encrypted and a ransom was demanded to release the files back to the owner. The computers affected had Microsoft operating systems with protection not up to date, effectively leaving them as sitting ducks, Mr Murphy said.
