Hacker attack on paper pearls – attacks on supply chains are the next big hacking trend

IrSometime in the Friday night suddenly had to go to the paper mill in PerlenH everything go very quickly: Dhe monitoring systems at the Perlen site haveenoAn external attack on the IT systems was discovered, wrote the CPH group in a Ad hoc announcement. All IT systems in the group were then immediately shut down in a controlled manner in accordance with the emergency concept. Production in the areas of paper and packaging in Perlen and at the Müllheim site were also stopped, only the chemicals area could continue to produce.

On request, the paper mill was unable to describe how the attack took place in detail. «It is too early to say what type of attack it was»says Christian Weber, spokesman for the CPH group. «We are currently in the process of restarting the systems and only then can we estimate which areas of the IT infrastructure are affected.»

What is clear, however, is that production cannot resume until Monday at the earliest. Three days of downtime when the machines would otherwise run around the clock. The critical thing is that the paper mill in Perlen is the only one that still produces paper for newspapers in Switzerland. As the NZZ writes, the purchasing group of the four largest Swiss publishers (Tamedia, Ringier, NZZ, CH-Media) gets almost half of the paper it needs from Perlen. In October of last year, it was possible to experience what a loss of production in Perlen would mean for the Swiss newspaper landscape. Toto the the paper mill was temporarily shut down due to a fire, they had to Newspapers their print editions thin out.

Weber cannot rule out bottlenecks this time either: «The implications are not yet clear and will depend on how quickly production can be restarted.» Over the weekend, revision work was brought forward, which would have been pending anyway.

The attack fits into the scheme of what the corporate insurer Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) paid much attention to «Cyber ​​Report 2021» as «the next big hacking trend» exclaimed: attacks on supply chains. Germany’s largestssThe insurer anticipates that global supply chains in particular will be affected by such attacks. And the attacks are now much better organized. The hackers have refined their tactics and their business model, professional hacker groups are increasingly offering their services as a service on the Internet. The ransom sums usually subsequently demanded have also risen continuously in recent years. In the meantime, some of the claims are in the range of 50 million euros, according to the report.

In May, for example, hackers paralyzed the systems of the US gasoline supplier Colonial Pipeline with ransomware, which at times did so the fuel supply critical on the entire US east coast. However, attacks on security companies that are carried out on the computer systems of their Kand inside Kand who should actually ensure that data remains protected. In the middle of last year, hackers from the criminal group called REvil broke into an IT security company in the USA and managed to install ransomware on several Kand inside Kunden to play. Were concerned Tthousands of computers worldwide. Among other things, the Swedish supermarket chain Coop. As the BBC writes, almost all 800 shops had to be closed at times because the registers no longer worked as a result of the ransomware attack.