New York Times: Experts said that the attackers were most likely motivated by money. After paralyzing operations, they could attempt to extort local governments and companies into paying large ransoms, or sell the stolen information.
…In the past two weeks, a public university had to cancel classes for a week after its servers were attacked. A car-sharing service said that more than one million personal documents had been leaked, including headshots on driver’s licenses and home addresses. A ransomware attack on a cloud service operator owned by SoftBank affected almost 500 companies and local governments, including a rail operator and a police headquarters…