Major shipping firm Maersk has reported that, following a devastating ransomware attack, it had to reinstall and replace thousands of hardware.
The company’s IT systems and operational controls were affected by a modified version of the Petya ransomware, NonPetya. Maersk projected that the cyberattack would cause losses of up to $300 million due to “serious business interruption.”
ZDNet reported that no customer or business data was believed to have been exposed as a result of the cyberattack on Maersk. However, the attack disrupted business, forcing the firm to halt operations as the ransomware spread to core IT systems.
Møller-Maersk chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe revealed during the World Economic Forum that the attack resulted in a reinstall of “[the company’s] entire infrastructure.”
Hagemann noted that, in total, Maersk reinstalled 4,000 servers, 45,000 PCs, and 2,500 applications, in a 10-day process that the chairman described as a “heroic effort.”
“Imagine a company where a ship with 10 to 20 thousand containers is entering a port every 15 minutes, and for 10 days, you have no IT,” he commented. “It’s almost impossible to even imagine.”
Maersk managed to mitigate the damage to its systems, and only experienced a 20% drop in volume – the remaining 80% of operations were handled manually until everything could be restored back to working order.
The attack was a “very significant wake-up call for Maersk, and you could say, a very expensive one,” remarked Hagemann.
“We were basically average when it came to cybersecurity, like many companies,” he added. “This was a wake-up call not just to become good, but to have cybersecurity as a competitive advantage.”
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