Honda temporarily shuts down its production as it was hit by a snake ransomware attack
Honda temporarily shuts down its production as it was hit by a snake ransomware attack.
Honda
Honda, a Japanese company leading is the world's largest manufacturer of two-wheelers. It employs more than 200,000 staff, with factories in the U.K, North America and Europe.
What is the information available online?
According to Justin Paine, the information appeared to be something like an inventory of all internal machines which includes information such as machine hostname, MAC address, internal IP, operating system version, which patches had been applied, and the status of Honda’s endpoint security software.
Honda’s Twitter feed
The company tweeted that both Honda Customer Service and Honda Financial Services are “experiencing technical difficulties and are unavailable”.
The customers confronting problems with their vehicles are being instructed to DM their full name, VIN, mileage, address, email, contact number and other details through to Honda on Twitter.
The production in Japan, the U.S, Turkey, India and Brazil halted on Monday, though some of the plants have come back online.
“Honda has experienced a cyberattack that has affected production operations at some U.S plants. However, there is no current evidence of loss of personally identifiable information. We have resumed production in most plants and are currently working toward the return to production of our auto and engine plants in Ohio,” said a Honda spokesperson.
“This attack appears to be a ransomware attack associated with the snake cybercrime group as samples of malware the check for an internal system name and public IP addresses related to Honda have surfaced publicly on the internet,” said Chris Clements, Vice President of Solution Architect at IT service management company Cerberus Cyber Sentinel Corp. “ The malware exits immediately if associations with Honda are not detected. This strongly implies that this was a targeted attack rather than a case of cyber criminals spraying out ransomware indiscriminately.”
What is snake ransomware?
Snake ransomware, also known as Ekans was discovered by the MalwareHunter team. Research shows that cybercriminals behind it target the entire business networks rather than a PC or two. Then they jumble files & documents and hold them hostage for a ransom expected to be paid in cryptocurrency. Once the ransom is paid, the victim gets the decryption key in return.
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