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Article snippet: Governments, companies and security experts from audacious global cyberattack amid fears that if they did not succeed, companies would lose their data unless they met ransom demands. The global efforts came less than a day after malicious software, transmitted via email and stolen from the National Security Agency, targeted vulnerabilities in computer systems in almost 100 countries in one of the largest “ransomware” attacks on record. The cyberattackers took over the computers, encrypted the information on them and then demanded payment of $300 or more from users to unlock the devices. Some of the world’s largest institutions and government agencies were affected, including the Russian Interior Ministry, FedEx in the United States and Britain’s National Health Service. In Romania on Saturday, the carmaker Dacia, owned by the French carmaker Renault, sent home some employees at a large factory complex in the city of Mioveni because the attack had disrupted its systems. As people fretted over whether to pay the digital ransom or lose data, experts said the attackers might eventually pocket more than $1 billion worldwide before the deadline ran out to unlock the computers. But as of Saturday afternoon, the money raised by the attackers, who demanded payment using the virtual currency Bitcoin, was much lower. Funds totaling the equivalent of about $33,000 were deposited into several Bitcoin accounts associated with the ransomware, according to Elliptic, a company th... Link to the full article to read more