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Cyber attack thwarted by flipping 'kill switch' but experts fear new blitz

Europe and Russia were left reeling today by a malicious global cyber attack that used leaked NSA tools to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows and spread ransomware across networks around the world.

Tens of thousands of users from London to St. Petersburg logged on yesterday to find ominous threats to delete their suddenly encrypted computer files unless they cough up $300 or more in Bitcoin payments to the unknown perpetrators, security experts and intelligence officials told ABC News today.

A message saying “Oops, your important files are encrypted” flashed across screens all over the world. According to The New York Times, experts estimated that before the last affected computers are unlocked, victims could collectively pay more than $1 billion to the attackers.

The attack appears to have been thwarted by private cyber security researchers who identified and triggered the malware’s "kill switch," which halted the attacks before it spread throughout U.S. networks, a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed, but it is unclear whether, the official said, a modified attack will soon be launched.

"That is a huge concern right now," said Darien Huss, a senior security research engineer at Proofpoint who was among the researchers who helped disable the virus, called "WannaCry," told ABC News today. "It would not be very difficult at all to re-release this ransomware attack without a kill switch or without an approved kill switch that only they can activate."

Huss is also worried about copycats, who could "take the exploit code that was used in this attack and implement it into their own virus."

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http://abcnews.go.com/US/cyberattack-thwarted-flipping-kill-switch-experts-fear-blitz/story?id=47396119