Monday, June 7, 2021

Chemical plant in Switzerland hit by ransomware

From this week's issue of C&EN (article by Rick Mullin): 
The Swiss pharmaceutical services firm Siegfried says it is beginning to ramp up production after ceasing operations at multiple sites in response to a malware attack it detected May 21. Operations at the firm’s Hameln, Germany, site, where it provides fill-and-finish services for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, restarted during the week of May 31. Siegfried says it anticipates a revenue shortfall in the first half of the year as a result of the outage, but it expects to recoup losses by the end of the year.

I don't know what to do about ransomware other than to insist on better IT security practices? Time for the world to fight the online version of the Barbary Wars?  



1 comment:

  1. As a non-IT professional, I've read throughout the internet that there really is nothing you can do for a ransomware attack. It's far more common today, but the Merck attack in 2017ish allegedly cost them over $1B, and their insurers would not cover any of it because they deemed it an "act of war". Not sure if things have changed since then.

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