Ukraine finally battens down its leaky cyber hatches after attacks

FILE PHOTO: A message demanding money is seen on a monitor of a payment terminal at a branch of Ukraine's state-owned bank Oschadbank after Ukrainian institutions were hit by a wave of cyber attacks earlier in the day, in Kiev, Ukraine, June 27, 2017. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko/File Photo

KIEV (Reuters) - When the chief of Microsoft Ukraine switched jobs to work for President Petro Poroshenko, he found that everyone in the office used the same login password. It wasn't the only symptom of lax IT security in a country suffering crippling cyber attacks.

Sometimes pressing the spacebar was enough to open a PC, according to Dmytro Shymkiv, who became Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration with a reform brief in 2014.