October 5, 2017 - 14:50 AMT
Russia says Armenian specialists helped stop WannaCry attack

Head of the Federal Security Service of Russia Alexander Bortnikov has given credit to Armenian IT specialists for helping the country minimize the consequences of WannaCry ransomware attack in Russia.

Bortnikov was addressing the 16th international meeting of the heads of special services, security and law enforcement agencies, which started in Krasnodar on Wednesday, October 4.

"In cooperation with colleagues from Armenia, we managed to prevent WannaCry from sneaking into the network of a number of large banks," Bortnikov said.

According to him, the interaction between the two countries helped neutralize the negative consequences of the virus against banking systems in other CSTO countries too.

The ransomware campaign was unprecedented in scale according to Europol, which estimates that around 200,000 computers were infected across 150 countries. According to Kaspersky Lab, the four most affected countries were Russia, Ukraine, India and Taiwan.