The police said today that it had no information of any computer systems in Malta being affected by the malware attack which has hit several countries.  

However it cautioned that since the attack started at the beginning of the weekend, some might not be aware yet that their computers were infected.  

The Police Cyber Crime Unit said it is gathering information from several entities to assess the implications locally, if any.

Users were urged to keep their operating systems and programmes up to date and to have proper back-ups. 

The police also recalled that they had joined the international “No More Ransom” project – www.nomoreransom.org – where one can find information on computer protection. 

 computer.crime@gov.mt

Internationally, the ransomware worm has stopped car factories, hospitals, shops and schools.

Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry - "ransomware" which locked up more than 200,000 computers - had slowed, but the respite might only be brief.

New versions of the worm are expected, they said, and the extent of the damage from Friday's attack remains unclear.

Infected computers appear to largely be out-of-date devices that organisations deemed not worth the price of upgrading or, in some cases, machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions that proved too difficult to patch without possibly disrupting crucial operations, security experts said.

Marin Ivezic, cybersecurity partner at PwC, said that some clients had been "working around the clock since the story broke" to restore systems and install software updates, or patches, or restore systems from backups.

Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks, a rare and powerful feature that caused infections to surge on Friday.

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 National Security Agency hacking tools. The agency has not responded to requests for comment.

Hong Kong-based Ivezic said that the ransomware was forcing some more "mature" clients affected by the worm to abandon their usual cautious testing of patches "to do unscheduled downtime and urgent patching, which is causing some inconvenience."

He declined to identify which clients had been affected.

The head of the European Union police agency said the cyber assault hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries and that number will grow when people return to work.

"The global reach is unprecedented ... and those victims, many of those will be businesses, including large corporations," Europol Director Rob Wainwright told Britain's ITV.

"At the moment, we are in the face of an escalating threat. The numbers are going up, I am worried about how the numbers will continue to grow when people go to work and turn (on) their machines on Monday morning." Nangoy,

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