Maersk has made it official that its business subsidiary operating in Australia was hit by a second cyber attack early this month. Security analysts at Svitzer Australia have discovered that the email system of the company was under the control of hackers from past 10 months before the hack was discovered on March 1st this year.
As per the latest update was given by Danish Shipping Company Maritime Danmark, the attack on ‘Svitzer’ email system was contained and was limited to the operations of the Australian firm, which runs on a separate computer network isolated from the rest of the Maersk Group.
Officials confirm that the attack was second of its kind and was in no way connected to the one (NotPetya) which hit Maersk’s global operations in June last year.
And highly placed sources of Cybersecurity Insiders have reported that the email system was under the control of two hackers from May’17 to March ’18. The systems were reportedly found redirecting emails to recipients outside Svitzer Australia’s network in the said tenure.
Note 1- In June 28th, 2017, a ransomware attack of NotPetya variant hit the Danish shipping giant AP Moller-Maersk. The cyber attack caused a global outage to the operations of the company and saw millions of dollars getting wiped out from Maersk’s revenue stream in the last financial year.
Note 2- In the second attack Svitzer officials haven’t disclosed the details of the attack yet, but confirmed that the attack could have been the work of some state-funded actors.
Note 3- US Intelligence has confirmed that the NotPetya ransomware attack was spread by Russian cyber army which is being funded by Vladimir Putin and his government. On the other hand, UK blamed North Korea’s Lazarus Group for launching Wannacry Ransomware Attack on May’17.
