On Friday 7th June, the aircraft parts manufacture ASCO became the latest organisation to be hit with a severe ransom attack, causing production in factories across four countries to cease immediately.
Who are ASCO?
ASCO are a private company who design and manufacture aircraft components to some of the biggest names in aviation, such as Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin. The originally Belgium based company was founded in 1945 and now have four manufacturing plants across Belgium, United States, Canada and Germany, employing approximately 1,500 people. In 2018. they were acquired by US-based Spirit AeroSystems.
What Happened?
The attack occurred on Friday 7th June and originally, ASCO only confirmed that someone had attacked their servers, refusing to comment further. Since then, the aircraft parts manufacture have elaborated further and revealed to Data News that they were the victim of a ransomware attack.
The company was forced to cease production across all production centres resulting in approximately 1,000 of the 1,400 workforce being sent home. At this time, it is unclear if the company closed down factories in Germany, Canada and the US as a precautionary measure or if the ransomware managed to spread further than the Belgium plant. Upon discovering the attack, management immediately alerted authorities regarding it and HR director, Vicky Welvaert, confirmed that they had brought in experts to carry out an investigation, declining to comment on whether the problem was under control.
It is not clear whether the company paid the ransom in order to resume production or restored the system using previous backups.
ASCO are not the first large organisation to suffer a ransomware attack and certainly won’t be the last. If we look back a couple of months to March, Norwegian company, Norsk Hydro shut down plants in attempts to try to contain a “LockerGoga” ransomware infection which eventually cost the company an estimated $40 millions in recovery costs. Since the attack, the aluminium manufacturer has reported that profits have dropped 82% in the first quarter of 2019 compared to the previous year.
The increasing number of ransomware and cyber-attacks is highlighting the importance of organisations implementing strong security and defence systems against these types of attacks. Failing to do so can result in no other option than to pay the high ransom demands which could be enough to bankrupt some companies.
