Panasonic Canada issued a public statement admitting a sophisticated cyber attack on its servers that occurred in February this year. The Japan-based company issued an apology for the incident and assured only its Canadian operations were affected by the malware attack.
Panasonic provided its statement through online technology resource TechCrunch and admitted that some of its processes, systems and networks were compromised.
VX-Underground, a malware research group claims that Panasonic became a victim of Conti Ransomware group’s malware spreading campaign that was into the business of distributing file encrypting malware to large organizations that could pay huge ransoms.
Thus, with the confirmation from the security firm, Panasonic Canada is the 4th firm to be targeted by Conti gang after Shutterfly, Ireland’s healthcare service firm and Fat Face.
Conti’s website claims it siphoned about 2.8 GB of data from the servers of the electronics giant and the stolen information includes HR and accounting department’s details, salary details of employees, spreadsheets and other internal sensitive material.
NOTE 1- Panasonic fell prey to another cyber attack, just within six months from the previous that occurred in November last year.
NOTE 2- Panasonic India was also hit by a ransomware in December 2020 and the hackers reportedly accessed about 4GB of data, including email addresses and financial data. During that time, Russian speaking REvil ransomware hackers were suspected to be behind the incident, as they posted on a dark forum that they were ready to sell the stolen data for $40,000 to anyone willing to pay them the said amount in virtual currency.
