On Tuesday 27 June, A.P. Moller-Maersk was hit as part of a global cyber-attack named Petya, affecting multiple sites and select business units, announced Maersk on Twitter. According to its update at 23:00 CEST, the company continues to “assess and manage the situation to minimise the impact on the customers and partners”.

Earlier that day Reuters informed that a major ransomware attack hit computer servers across Europe and in India causing outages at the computer systems across the world. All Maersk business units were affected, including container shipping, port and tug boat operations, oil and gas production, drilling services, and oil tankers.

According to the Dutch broadcaster RTV Rijnmond, 17 container terminals operated by APM Terminals were hacked, including two in Rotterdam and 15 in other countries. Computers were infected by ransomware that encrypted hard drives at APM Terminals.

Apart from that, media sources inform about other victims of the major cyber-attack the same day. These are Russia’s top oil producer Rosneft and a number of Ukrainian commercial banks, the main airport and state and private companies. Although it is not clear how it began, nor how it spread, some reports suggest that this was a coordinated hack launched at Ukraine and Russia at the same time. Some cyber security experts assume that this attack could be even bigger than the Wannacry attack in May, notoriously famous for locking down computers in hospitals and major companies worldwide. At that time, cyber security professionals warned that a repeat attack could be launched that would be even bigger.