PCCW among Hong Kong firms targeted in global hacking attack

Four of the city's biggest internet service providers fell victim to an international cyberattack that also affected 10,000 patients' health records held by Chinese University.

Servers at PCCW, Netvigator, Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) and Hutchison Global Communications were among more than half a million targeted globally. The hackers succeeded in the taking hostage a couple of hundred of servers, including 14 in Hong Kong.

The telecoms firms affected hosted devices, or servers, on networks compromised by hackers called Synolocker, according to data provided by internet monitoring company Shodan.

A spokeswoman for HKBN, which had seven servers affected, said: "We can confirm that seven of those [web server] IP addresses are owned by HKBN.

"We suspect the end user's device might have been hacked or attacked. The customer would not complain to the ISP [internet service provider], as it's their own responsibility to install appropriate firewall or shield software to protect their own device from hacking or attack."

Ivan Ho, spokesman for Netvigator and PCCW parent company Hong Kong Telecom, said that despite four servers being affected, the integrity of the HKT network was not compromised.