Maze Ransomware, the infamous team behind many attacks has now attacked North America’s largest wire and cable manufacturer. The hacker group has exfiltrated company data from its site and affected computers firm-wide. Further, the team has demanded to pay $6 million in ransom to not to publish the data.
Southwire, the victim of this case and a producer of industrial and household cables for more than half of North America. With billions of dollars in revenue, this famous wire making company is owned and run by a family for seven decades. Having more than 7,500 employees, Southwire is listed in Forbes list of America’s largest private companies.
The Hack
On Monday morning, the company’s site was subjected to hack with the admins finding a ransom note asking the company to pay 850 BTC. That translates to around $6 million. The ransom note was posted in Imgur and a topic was initiated in a subreddit already. Under which, a Reddit user (Sooze16) probably an employee of that firm has explained the situation as,
“I went into the offices yesterday afternoon. Everyone was headed home – no computers. Looks like their site is still down. The IT guy that was there told me that the plant called him at 5 am asking how to shut the servers down. Bad time of year not to be shipping.”
Unofficial Sayings
Though the company hadn’t made an official announcement of this hack yet, they’ve responded to BleepingComputer’s mails and talked to Atlanta Business Chronicle. Jason Pollard, VP of Talent Acquisition and Communications told to the Chronicle as, “We immediately self-quarantined by shutting down the entire network”, referencing the early morning attack.
Further, “The safety of our employees, the quality of our products and our commitment to our customers are critically important to us. Today, we’re bringing critical systems back online, prioritizing manufacturing and shipping functions that enable us to create and send the product to our customers. We are dedicated to restoring all systems and bringing all of our employees back to work as safely and as quickly as possible” Pollard said.
The site seemed to be live at the time of writing this article but isn’t displaying images.
