Manufacturing giant Aebi Schmidt hit by a damaging cyberattack
25 April 2019
Aebi Schmidt are a Switzerland-based maker of airport maintenance and road cleaning vehicles (Credit: Shutterstock)
Aebi Schmidt, a Swiss heavy equipment company, have reportedly been hit by a ransomware attack earlier this week.
The company has not made a public announcement, but a spokesperson told TechCrunch that systems went down across the company’s international network, with most of the damage affecting its European base. Systems for day-to-day operations were inaccessible and the company’s email has also, reportedly, been affected.
Terry Ray, SVP, Imperva says “Flip a coin – that’s basically the odds of any organisation being targeted. Ransomware infections are common, they typically get in through the oldest trick in the book, phishing. If you want to avoid being in the next headline, it will pay to be prepared now as to minimise operational downtime and decrease the expense associated with an attack, which could ultimately span to millions of dollars.
“There is no guarantee that if you pay the ransom your data will be recovered. In fact, a recent survey found that nearly half of ransomware victims have elected to pay ransomware attacks but only three in five ransom payers successfully recovered their data.
“The best way to prevent an attack is to immediately detect ransomware data access behaviours before the ransomware spreads across the network and encrypts critical data stores. Once detected, you can quarantine impacted users, devices and systems. Having a strategy that considers what happens when a cyber-attack occurs, whether it’s ransomware or another method, is essential to resiliency.”