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ALERT: Massive cyber attack hits several companies

Cape Town - Danish shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk has fallen victim to hacking, which seems to be part of a powerful cyber attack.

"We can confirm that Maersk IT systems are down across multiple sites and business units due to a cyber attack," the company said on its website.

"We continue to assess the situation. The safety of our employees, our operations and customer's business is our top priority. We will update when we have more information."

READ: Cyberattack: Know the jargon

The integrated transport and logistics company employs roughly 88 000 employees across operations in 130 countries.  

Hackers have caused widespread global disruption, according to media reports, which several companies bearing the brunt.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Pavlo Rozenko stated that all state computers were down, reported Reuters.

Russia’s Rosneft oil company and steel manufacturer Evraz, were also impacted, according to AP and Sky News.

Others companies being cited in the media to be affected include WPP, DLA Piper and Maersk.

Computers in dozens of countries were hit in May by what experts called an unprecedented mass cyber attack using ransomware.

At the time computers around the globe were hacked using a security flaw in Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, an older version that was no longer given mainstream tech support by the US giant.

The so-called WannaCry ransomware locked access to user files and demanded money in the form of the virtual currency Bitcoin in order to decrypt them.

Cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab said due to its magnitude, severity and complexity the WannaCry malware virus is the biggest of 2017 so far.

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