It was an average, sunny day in Copenhagen for shipping conglomerate A.P. Møller-Maersk, but that was all about to change.

It all started across the street, in another part of the Maersk compound, when IT administrator Henrik Jensen’s (not his real name) computer spontaneously restarted.

Assuming that this was another annoying unplanned reboot, Jensen didn’t think anything of it. As he scanned the room to see who else was affected, he noticed that every screen in the room was systematically blinking out.

WIRED reports his recollection of events:

“I saw a wave of screens turning black. Black, black, black. Black black black black black,” he says. The PCs, Jensen and his neighbors quickly discovered, were irreversibly locked. Restarting only returned them to the same black screen.

Within minutes, all hell broke loose, as Maersk employees got wise to the unfolding events.

Maersk employees were running down hallways, yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from Maersk’s network before the malicious software could infect them, as it dawned on them that every minute could mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs.

Tech workers ran into conference rooms and unplugged machines in the middle of meetings. Soon staffers were hurdling over locked key-card gates, which had been paralyzed by the still-mysterious malware, to spread the warning to other sections of the building.

When Jensen left that day, he had no idea when he would be returning to work.

The maritime giant that employed him, responsible for 76 ports on all sides of the earth and nearly 800 seafaring vessels, including container ships carrying tens of millions of tons of cargo, representing close to a fifth of the entire world’s shipping capacity, was dead in the water.

Operations at Maersk terminals in four different countries were impacted, causing delays and disruption that lasted weeks, and the company issued a statement saying that the total cost for dealing with the outbreak cost somewhere between the $200 to $300 million range.

The ‘yet unknown’ software destroying Maersk turned out to be ‘NotPetya’, a malicious ransomware that spread like wildfire, throughout the world, eating electronic equipment, extracting data and destroying systems.

For the past four and a half years, Ukraine has been locked in a grinding, undeclared war with Russia that has killed more than 10,000 Ukrainians and displaced millions more. The conflict has also seen Ukraine become a scorched-earth testing ground for Russian cyberwar tactics.

According to Business Standard, it was this conflict between two nations that gave birth to NotPetya.

The attacks, which started as a catalyst to win the war against Ukraine, precisely targeting several electronics and computers in hotels, hospitals, government offices etc in the country, ultimately ended up causing vast devastation across the world. Right from losses witnessed in the shipping terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Manhattan’s skyscrapers and from offices in the UK to Ghana, the worm slid through every government data, eating its way to wiping away important historical documents, sabotaging records and creating panic over the world.

Although the ransomware has been contained, NotPetya has not been wholly eradicated. More than a year later, and the virus still emerges in different parts of the world, with the potential to recur in a larger form.

WIRED’s full account of the havoc it was wrought is long, but if you’re the kind who likes a cybercrime caper, you can read the rest of the story here.

What lessons can we learn from this? Well, if all the computers in your office simultaneously turn black, you might want to panic.

It also pays to have the best in the business, shipping-wise, on your side. Experts like Berry & Donaldson have been helping importers and exporters navigate the labyrinth that is international freighting for over half a century, and they’ve dealt with anything that the business can throw at them.

Handling everything from airlines, shipping companies, and customs-related processes, as well as warehousing, insurance and cargo deliveries, they take care of each step of the complicated process of getting your cargo to and from the required destinations.

Plus, they made it through the NotPetya crisis unscathed, so my money is on them to get the job done.

While they handle the shipping and freight logistics, you can focus on protecting your personal tech safety.

Make sure you have a unique password, don’t click on unknown attachments, and update your anti-virus software, because ransomware isn’t going away anytime soon.

[sources:wired&businessstandard]