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A ransomware outbreak is once again being blamed for computer chaos at organisations around the world.

The Ukrainian interior minister has said his country is facing . A number of institutions, including the national bank, the state power company and transport hubs in the country have been affected.

But reports of organisations struck by severe IT issues have started to trickle in from elsewhere in the world as well.

Other victims include Danish company Maersk, the largest shipping container firm in the world. It has reported that its IT systems  due to a cyber attack.

The world’s largest advertising firm, WPP, has also said that it is suffering IT issues. And a receptionist at Mondelez International – a large food and beverage company that owns Cadbury’s in the UK – told New ������ý that the company’s computer systems around the world are down.

And Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, has also announced that it was . The firm’s website is currently offline.

Security experts monitoring the situation believe the chaos is possibly the result of an outbreak of the Petya ransomware – which  and then demands a payment before returning access to the user.

This has not yet been confirmed by those affected – and it is not yet clear whether the incidents in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere are connected.

Echoes of WannaCry

However, if this is a widespread ransomware attack, it echoes the WannaCry epidemic that rapidly infected hundreds of hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe last month.

Like WannaCry, Petya demands a $300 payment made via Bitcoin. Researchers are now trying to find out whether these latest malware infections have spread via the same Server Message Block (SMB) vulnerability in Windows exploited by WannaCry. It was this flaw that allowed WannaCry to infect other computers on the same network automatically.

“Whilst analysts are still trying to confirm, the speed with which it has spread suggests an automated mechanism such as was used in WannaCry,” says Alan Woodward, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey, UK. “It may prove to be the same flaw that is being exploited. Many organisations have still not patched their systems so it is entirely possible this is the cause of it spreading so fast.”

A spokesman for the UK’s National Health Service, which was badly affected during the WannaCry outbreak, told New ������ý he was not aware of the organisation being hit in this latest incident.