Ransomware attack strikes Norwegian aluminum company Norsk Hydro

A very big aluminum manufacturing company in the world has been one recent victim of certain severe ransomware attack which led to the closure of all its global units, disruption else halting of plants, while struggle with IT repairs is ongoing for getting back to normal.

The manufacturer named Norsk Hydro based in Norway stated the ransomware attack started from USA when PCs there became infected on 18th March night. The next morning, the aluminum plant's other parts in some forty countries had already contracted the infection. Officials from the plant quarantined the subsidiary units for stopping the infection from spreading further. Certain units were tentatively shut down, whilst others that required running continuously started manual operation. A total of 35,000 employees of the plant were asked for switching off their PCs, however, they could check e-mail from their tablets and phones.

Eivind Kallevik Chief Financial Officer at Norsk Hydro said the situation was clearly quite severe following the attack. The whole global network was inoperable, impacting the company's production level along with its office operations. The company was working hard for getting control over the situation as well as making sure its employees were safe and secure. Currently, the company's key priority was for making sure operations were safe while financial and operational affects were the minimum, Kallevik stated. Arstechnica.com posted this, March 20, 2019.

Most of the subsidiary units, according to Kallevik, were running normal, but shutdown of the global network stopped the individual units getting customers' future orders. Losses were minimal although they were likely to increase incase restoration of automated systems got delayed. Kallevik couldn't state the specific time by when the network would become disinfected.

The CFO said Norsk's information technology team was sanitizing the contaminated systems off the ransomware. When that would finish, the team would go about recovering lost data with the aid of backups with the company. Kallevik, in response to a query about whether the company decided against paying up to the attackers, said the company was focusing on using backup. Security officials of Norway stated the cyber-assault could occur from LockerGoga one comparatively fresh ransomware strain.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/22/2019