A second UK university has been hit Attack.Ransom by a major ransomware attack Attack.Ransom this week , as new figures showed the country is the most frequently targeted by the malware in Europe . The attack Attack.Ransom appears to have struck Northern Ireland ’ s Ulster University on the same day a ransomware outage Attack.Ransom affected University College London ( UCL ) . Ulster Uni ’ s Information Services Division ( ISD ) revealed yesterday that its AV partner suspects a zero-day threat was the cause , also echoing the current thinking at UCL . Three departmental file shares have been affected and remained at “ read only ” access at the time of writing . Like its counterparts at UCL , Ulster University ’ s ISD appears to be following best practice regarding back-ups , which will help mitigate the impact of the attack . It explained : “ ISD take backups of all our shared drives and this should protect most data even if it has been encrypted by the malware . Once we are confident the infections have been contained , then we will restore the most recent back up of the file . ISD can confirm that a backup of the shares was successfully taken at close of business on Tuesday 12th June. ” Fraser Kyne , EMEA CTO at Bromium , urged all UK university IT teams to be on high alert for possible attacks . “ The initial reports are suggesting that the ransomware was able to get in at UCL through a zero-day exploit , which allowed it to bypass antivirus software , ” he added . “ That really underscores the limitations of antivirus ; in that it is only able to stop things that it knows are bad . Given that most malware is only seen once in the wild before it evolves into something different , there ’ s very little that antivirus can offer in the way of protection. ” UCL now believes the initial infection vector was a user visiting a compromised website rather than opening a phishing email attachment as first thought . The latest stats from Malwarebytes show the UK is the hardest hit in Europe when it comes to ransomware . There were three-times as many detections in the UK in Q1 2017 than the next most impacted country : France . In fact , while ransomware infections dropped 4 % across Europe they increased 57 % in the UK year-on-year . The total volume of cyber-attacks on UK firms soared 500 % year-on-year , with no single threat type declining . Across Europe , Italy and the UK were almost tied as having the highest number of malware detections in Europe ; 16.3 % and 16.2 % respectively .