Shipping company’s networks in the Americas crippled by ransomware attack
COSCO’s computer networks in the Americas remained completely severed from the Internet on Thursday, almost 48 hours after the Chinese shipping giant reported it was hit by a ransomware attack.
In a statement published Thursday, COSCO officials said the failures affected networks in the US, Canada, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay. The statement said people who wanted to reach COSCO employees in those countries should use special email addresses, many of which were hosted by Yahoo and Gmail. Attempts to reach COSCO’s US-based website were unsuccessful. COSCO officials said main business operation systems were performing stably and that ports in California and the UK remained open.
The statement—and posts on COSCO’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts—didn’t disclose the reason for the outage. The Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California, however, reported on Tuesday that the China state-owned shipping company was infected by ransomware. The report didn’t identify the name or strain of the ransomware, which generally encrypts computer hard drives and demands a payment by digital currency to decrypt it.
