Cyber Criminals spreading Maze Ransomware have hit two large companies early this year. And surprisingly both the companies belong to the field of construction.
Going by the details, Canadian firm Bird Construction has released a press update to CBC saying that it has become a victim of Maze ransomware and hackers were demanding approximately 9 million in exchange for a decryption key. To authenticate their stand, the hacker/s claims that they have stolen around 60 Gigabytes of data which will be released into the wild if the victim i.e Bird Construction fails to pay the demanding ransom in Cryptocurrency.
Founded in 1920 and having annual revenue of $1.3 billion, Bird Construction happens to be an only company serving at the federal and provincial levels since 2006.
Although the cyber incident did not impact the normal operations of the company, Cybersecurity experts were being pressed into service to recover the locked-up data.
Meanwhile, French Company Bouygues which is also into construction business has released a press statement yesterday that it became a victim of a Maze Ransomware cyber-attack on January 30th, 2020.
A spokesperson from Paris confirmed the news and added that the operations related to construction weren’t affected by the attack.
However, the news is out that the servers related to Bouygues Construction located in Canada were deeply impacted by the file-encrypting malware and so it impacted the company’s operations across the world to a certain extent.
Security experts from Microsoft and McAfee have been pressed into service to investigate the incident and recover the data from the clutches of the hackers. Moreover, the IT staff of Bouygues say that they do not have any intention to bow down to the demands of the hackers- meaning they are not going to pay the ransom of 10 Million Euros which might trigger the hackers to release the stolen 200GB of data onto the dark web.
Note 1- In 2019, Eurofins also became a victim of a ransomware attack and had to incur a loss of over 63 million.
Note 2- Australian Company Toll Group which is related to the Transport and Logistics business field has reportedly shut down its operations since last Saturday due to a ransomware cyber attack. However, the subject related to the file-encrypting malware attack is yet to be confirmed by the authorities.
