After the US Colonial Pipeline, it’s up to Toshiba. The aims of the hacker group DarkSide have shifted to the Japanese multinational, targeting the division that produces photocopiers and POS payment systems.
The news was reported by the French branch of the company, which indicated the DarkSide group as responsible for the incident. The Japanese company reported that the ransomware-type attack – a particular piece of malware that blocks access to the systems or files of the attacked users and demands the payment of a ransom to make them accessible again – hit a quantity of data. quite small work. The same data, however, for Toshiba is to be considered lost.
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A clear sign that the corporate leadership has decided not to want to pay the probable ransom proposed by the hackers. «After discovering the damage, – they let know by Toshiba TechGroup – we immediately reported it to the European authorities. The group has also implemented countermeasures to stop the networks and systems operating between Japan and Europe, as well as those active in the European subsidiaries, in order to prevent their spread during the maneuvers necessary for restoration ».
The US oil pipeline
The attack on Toshiba comes a few days after the very noisy one on the US Colonial Pipeline. An unprecedented action, the latter, which knocked out a web of pipelines of 8,850 kilometers, which guarantees almost half of the fuel supplies of the East Coast of the United States. With the attack on the computer systems of the Colonial Pipeline, the hackers managed, in practice, to paralyze supplies of 2.5 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products, directed from refineries in the Gulf of Mexico not only to the New York area but also to important centers in the south of the USA, including Atlanta airport, the busiest in the world by number of passengers. And it is no coincidence, then, that we are talking about one of the most serious cyber attacks ever carried out in history, which exposed the vulnerability of US infrastructures in a merciless way.
The attack on the US pipeline took place on the evening of Friday 7 May, but the story was made public almost twenty-four hours later, when Colonial Pipeline had to communicate that it had blocked “some systems to contain the threat”.