A South Korean container transportation and shipping company, HMM, has become the latest shipping company to suffer a cyber attack. The company confirmed that they had identified a security breach, granting the attacker access to their email systems.
Most of the damage has been restored and no evidence of a data or information leak have been found.
Aside from Europe and America, HMM’s outlook email servers continue to be affected, however they are gradually returning to normal with a full investigation to try and prevent further cyber security incidents.
The company stated that its other systems are fully operational.
This attack follows a large string of cyber attacks targeting shipping companies in recent years, such as CMA CGM, MSC, Cosco and Maersk.
The most notable of which was the Maersk attack, back in June 2017.
The infamous NotPetya malware took hold of Maersk’s IT systems and the company’s operations ground to a halt. “All end-user devices, including 49,000 laptops and print capability, were destroyed,” wiping out access to almost all of its data.
The virus, once activated, propagated within just seven minutes. And for Maersk, as with other organizations, the level of destruction was enormous.
As well as affecting print and file-sharing capabilities, laptops, apps and servers, NotPetya severely damaged both Maersk’s implementations of DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and Active Directory, which, respectively, allow devices to participate in networks by allocating IP addresses and provide a directory lookup for valid addresses. Along with those, the technology controlling its access to cloud services was also damaged and became unstable while its service bus was completely lost.
The attack was estimated to have cost the company around £200 million and was initiated by a single employee replying to an email with the malware embedded into it.
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