The Interfax news agency is back online after suffering a large-scale virus attack which also spread to other countries.
Servers in Ukraine, Turkey and Germany were among 200 targets of malicious software that demands a ransom in exchange for unscrambling data, Russian cyber-security company Kaspersky Lab said.
The “Bad Rabbit" virus also forced Interfax, one of Russia’s biggest news agencies, offline for two days.
Access to Interfax’s public website and its corporate database had been restored by early Thursday morning, but its subscription services and smartphone application were still inaccessible.
The St. Petersburg-based news website Fontanka.ru, which said it had suffered a similar attack on Tuesday, was also back online.
Another Russian cyber-security firm, Group-IB, said Wednesday that some of Russia’s top 20 banks had also been targeted.
Group-IB said Bad Rabbit is a modified version of the NotPetya virus, which targeted Russian and Ukrainian computer systems in June.
The attack was estimated to have caused $850 million in damages.
In May, another virus that encrypts files and charges victims a fee to recover data crippled computers around the world, including in Russia, and caused $8 billion in damages, according to the Reuters news agency.
