Category: Technology

In this day and age, ransomware cyberattacks are happening every 11 seconds on various industries, making it a big business – a big business that is estimated to cause $20 billion worth of damage by 2021. Manufacturing and government are the hardest hit according to industry, the United States by country.

Ransomware attacks surged again in the month of June with Covid-19 related phishing techniques still proving popular with cybercriminals. Notable attacks include Honda, who had their European operations significantly affected, and the University of California who reportedly paid $1.14 million to recover academic data related to its Covid-19 research. Here is a roundup of the incidents we uncovered:

We start the month in South Africa with telecoms firm Telkom SA SOC Ltd. We found limited coverage of the incident, but it was reported that the attack led to outages across several systems with remote staff unable to connect to the servers or VPN.

Up next is Columbia College in Chicago who were attacked just one week after the attack on Michigan State University. On the Netwalker blog the cybercriminals claimed to have exfiltrated very highly- sensitive data during the attack.

Hackers continued their spree on US colleges when they hit the University of California on the same day. Important Covid-19 research was encrypted during the attack and the school paid out $1.14 million to recover the data.

The City of Florence in Alabama became the next victim on June 5 when an attack shut down the city’s email system. The city reportedly paid over $250K to recover the encrypted data.

The next attack took place at VT San Antonio Aerospace, the US subsidiary of ST Engineering Aerospace in Singapore. The ransomware attack resulted in the exposure of confidential data including government contracts.

Automotive giant Honda suffered an Ekans ransomware attack which targeted its offices in the United States, Europe and Japan. The attack forced many offices to shut down in what was likely the most publicized ransomware incident of the month.

Earlier in the month Australian beverage giant Lion disclosed they had been the victim of a cyberattack, they later confirmed it was ransomware. The company’s data was said to be available on the Dark Web but at the time of writing the company did not have any evidence of data being exfiltrated.

Over to New Mexico next where nuclear missile contractor Westech International was the victim of a Maze ransomware attack. Hackers were able to access sensitive employee information, but it is still unconfirmed whether any classified military information was accessed.

Next up is Norwegian shipbuilder Vard, Europe’s first attack of the month. Local reports indicate that company servers were hit with an encryption attack which led to downtime. The overall extent of the damage has not yet been disclosed.

Fisher and Paykel, a whitegoods manufacturer based in New Zealand disclosed they had been targeted by Nefilim. Although quickly identified, the hackers did disclose an initial leak of the company’s corporate files on the Dark Web.

New York company Threadstone Advisors, a mergers and acquisitions firm whose client list includes Victoria Beckham, were hit by Maze ransomware. The gang insists that they had exfiltrated and encrypted the company’s data.

An overnight attack hit the City of Knoxville in Tennessee. Fortunately emergency services were not affected in the attack but by the time it was noticed by the IT department the ransomware had already encrypted multiple systems. Knoxville joins a list of affected cities including Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver and New Orleans.

Back to Europe now where this time it was European Energy giant Enel Group. The incident was the work of the Snake ransomware group who were also responsible for the attack at Honda earlier in the month.

Rhode Island-based Care New England (CNE) was victim of a cyberattack that hit its servers on June 16. The suspected ransomware attack forced the shutdown of its website and other internal systems.

Up next is Florida based ConnectWise who hit the headlines when it was revealed that their partners were hit by ransomware through a software flaw in their platform.

Electronics giant LG is reportedly being threatened by the Maze ransomware gang, however at the time of writing no official statement had been issued by the company.

Closing out the month is another suspected attack on car giant Mitsubishi. The Doppelpaymer gang are allegedly threatening to leak data from the organization, although at the time of writing there has been no official statement from the company.

To read more about the ransomware attacks of 2020, click here.

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