First is the news related to a ransomware attack on a Candy maker that trade experts say could lead to chocolate scarcity when it is most needed by/for kids. And with only few days left for events such as Trick and Treat and Halloween night, Candy maker Brachs is making all arrangements that the malware attack doesn’t affect its production as the peak of the Christmas 2021 season on its way.
Brachs spokesperson released a media update admitting the ransomware attack that took place on October 9th of this year, affecting the production severely at the Ferrara’s factories since then.
But the good news is that the recovery plan works excellently and so the everyday candy maker is sure that all its operations will report normalcy by this weekend.
Coming to the second news that is trending on Google news headlines, a study made by European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) says that hackers for hire have emerged as the biggest cyber threat in the last 15 months to take full advantage of the work from home culture because of the COVID-19 Pandemic spread.
ENISA says that between the periods of April 2020 to July 2021, many of the government agencies, along with some companies, were targeted with ransomware attacks by state funded actors.
Security report adds that adversary nations like China took full advantage of the Pandemic to launch email campaigns to spread multiple variant of ransomware and of those the health care sector was most targeted.
Third is the news related to a ransomware attack that hit Papua New Guinea’s finance department in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Reports are in that the threat actors infiltrated the systems of the Department of Finance’s Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) locking down access to millions of dollars that was meant as a foreign aid.
On condition of anonymity, a source from the accounting department said that the hackers breached the network through a business email flaw exhibited by the Microsoft servers and were demanding millions of dollars as ransom to clean up the data from the encryption malware.
Papua New Guinea’s Government is taking all security measures to mitigate the risks associated with the cyber incident and has hired a third party firm to investigate the ransomware attack deeply and to avoid such IT embarrassments in the future.
