Chinese security firms have hit out against suggestions that last month’s global WannaCry ransomware outbreak can be blamed on China. The WannaCry ransomware epidemic hit over 300,000 PCs around the globe, using worm-like capabilities to spread and infect Microsoft Windows machines — including many in China. While nobody has uncovered evidence to specifically identify the perpetrators, there are several theories as who might be behind the attack.
One hypothesis, offered by researchers Flashpoint following linguistic analysis of the WannaCry ransom note, is that it’s the work of a native or highly fluent Chinese speaker who used machine translation to convert the original note into other languages. But Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 has dismissed the claims and questioned the attempt to attribute the attacks by analyzing the ransom note text.