May 15, 2017
Nissan Motor Co. is trying to fix its British plant affected by the global cyberattack that began Friday, officials said Sunday.
Other Japanese companies with bases in Britain, one of the countries hit hard by the ransomware attack, continued to gather information.
Nissan found out on Friday evening local time that a manufacturing system at its Sunderland plant, in the northeast of the country, had been infected with a computer virus, the officials said.
As it was not possible to use the system, the plant stopped production. The company will not be able to resume the plant’s operations for a while if it takes time to fix the problem.
The Sunderland plant, which employs some 7,000 people, is the biggest automobile-manufacturing facility in Britain.
It produces 500,000 vehicles annually. Models produced there include the electric vehicle Leaf and the sport-utility vehicle Qashqai.
Officials at Fujitsu Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corp. said there have been no reports of damage from their British operations.
In Japan, many companies are bracing for Monday, as damage may spread when business activities increase.
The National Police Agency said the computers at one hospital and one person’s computer were infected by the malware, which encrypts computer files and makes them inaccessible until the user pays a ransom.
There was no financial loss in these two cases, the agency said.
It is believed that the ransomware circulated across networks by exploiting a weakness in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Source: The Japan Times