Cyberattack on logistics giant Expeditors International
While the year 2017 was not the luckiest year for Maersk because their global operations were hit by NotPetya ransomware. The year 2022 has brought similar bad news for Expeditors International.
Expeditors International, a global logistics company, has been forced to shut down a majority of its operations worldwide due to safety reasons after suffering a suspected acute ransomware attack over the weekend.
The company published a brief announcement concerning a global operations downtime after the incident, but it refrained from commenting on the type of cyberattack.
Based on the press release, a spokesperson for the company said that -“Upon discovering the incident, we shut down most of our operating systems globally to manage the safety of our overall global systems environment.”
The affected global chain of operations includes customs, freight, and distribution activities, which has led to customers’ shipments stalling.
Expeditors have planned to keep the systems offline until they can securely restore them from backups. Presumptions of this being a ransomware attack are since they have shut down their systems globally and moved it to restore them from backups, which often takes place in the situation of network-wide encryption.
Expeditors is a Fortune 500 service-based logistics company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA. It has annual gross revenue of around US $8.1 billion. They are specialised in customised supply chain solutions, Transportation, Customs and Compliance, Warehousing and Distribution, with a global presence in over 350 locations in 100+ countries on six continents and more than 18,000 workers.
It would be interesting to find out, unlike Maersk, if the attack was intentional and the company was targeted due to the ongoing crisis between relations of the US and Russia.
