A New Taipei City hospital said one of its computers early yesterday was attacked by the WannaCry ransomware virus, one day after the government reported there had been no incidents involving government agencies or hospitals in Taiwan.
An En Chu Kong Hospital spokesperson said no patient information was affected by the virus and the computer has been reformatted.
A message used in the attack demanded US$300 in bitcoin within three days, otherwise the ransom would double.
By the seventh day, if the ransom was not paid, it said that all the computer files would be deleted, the spokesperson said.
Hospital staff immediately disconnected from the Internet and reformatted the computer before its operating system was reprogrammed, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Cyber Security on Saturday urged the public not to open any unknown e-mails or links to protect their computers from infection.
A high-school student in Taoyuan said on Saturday that his computer was attacked by the ransomware, which encrypted his files and demanded US$600 in bitcoin.
The student said his computer was infected after logging onto Facebook, which showed a nonsensical message which led to the activation of the ransomware, police said.
The threat posed by WannaCry, or WanaCrypt0r 2.0, made international news on Friday when more than a dozen British hospitals were reported to have been attacked.
Cybersecurity firm Avast Software said that more than 75,000 WanaCrypt0r 2.0 attacks had been detected in 99 countries as of Friday.
Europol yesterday said the WannaCry attacks could have affected more than 200,000 people.
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