Asia

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

With Moon Jae-In’s victory in South Korea, the period of tension on the Korean Peninsula is likely to end. With the rise to power of the new president, South Korea can expect a sharp decline in hostilities with North Korea as well as a resumption of dialogue with China.

Having unleashed hell on over 100 nations and over 225,000 users worldwide on Friday, cybersecurity experts in Asia are bracing for the WannaCrypt ransomware plague to strike as the workweek begins.

As The South China Morning Post reports, thousands of computers across Asia were said to be affected with more reports expected when people return to work after the weekend, security experts said. Attley Ng, senior vice president of NSFOCUS Asia Pacific, a network security solutions company, said:

It was supposed to be China's day of celebrating massive infrastructure spending for the sake of spending (read ghost towns, only now outside China's borders) as Xi Jinping pledged $124 billion on Sunday for his new Silk Road plan to forge "a path of peace, inclusiveness and free trade" while calling for the abandonment of old models based on rivalry and diplomatic power games. However, it did not go quite as smoothly as expected.

Less than 24 hours after it first emerged, it has been called the first global, coordinated ransomware attack using hacking tools developed by the NSA, crippling over a dozen hospitals across the UK, mass transit around Europe, car factories in France and the UK, universitied in China, corporations in the US, banks in Russia and countless other mission-critical infrastructure.