Hydro ‘severe’ cyber attack
Mass-scale ransomware demands will become all the more common, while firms will struggle to repair reputational damage in the event of a cyber attack, Irish cybersecurity experts have warned.
Chief executive of Cork-based Smarttech247, Ronan Murphy, said it was not just cyber criminals willing to disrupt major firms but also rogue nations intent on increasing public disruption.
Chief executive of Dublin-based Ward Solutions, Pat Larkin, said the fallout from a cyber attack could far extend beyond financial damage, with some firms struggling to shake off damage to their reputations in the medium-to-long term.
Norwegian firm Norsk Hydro confirmed that a ransomware attack was behind production outages across the aluminium producer’s operations in Europe and the US. The perpetrators are still unknown but the work is similar to other recent breaches. The firm, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers, called the situation “quite severe,” and said it was still working to contain the effects.
It couldn’t immediately detail how much output had been impacted but said the so-called potlines, which process molten aluminium and need to be kept running 24 hours a day, had switched to manual mode.
So common and often costly are cyber attacks, large companies will take out insurance policies specifically to defend against them. Norsk Hydro chief financial officer Eivind Kallevik said the company has cyber insurance.
Cyber attacks have become a major threat to the highly integrated global supply of metals and minerals. Zinc smelter Nyrstar suffered a major intrusion targeting processing and mining operations earlier this year, while Moller-Maersk, the owner of the world’s biggest container shipping company, lost up to €264m because of a cyber attack in June.
Mr Murphy said attacks on critical infrastructure was lucrative to cybercriminals simply because firms and nations had to have operations run smoothly.
“If the supply chain is compromised, it has a profound effect on many industries,” he said.
Mr Larkin said the reputational damage of a cyber attack could actually threaten the long-term survivability of firms. If the perception was there that data and systems were insecure, it was hard to ever shake off the negative image, he said.
