CloudNordic and AzeroCloud, two prominent Danish cloud hosting firms, are currently facing a combined ransomware assault which has resulted in a massive loss of client data, as per their recent statements. Both companies have had to disable their email services and customer platforms. The perpetrators are demanding a ransom amounting to six Bitcoins, which is roughly $157,000, in order to decrypt the data.
The incident occurred on August 18. The individuals behind the attack, whose identities are still unknown, penetrated the cloud servers of both firms while they were transitioning to a different data center. This intrusion gave the attackers the opportunity to breach backup facilities and comprehensive data repositories, culminating in full server disk encryption.
While efforts from the IT departments have brought some servers back into operation, there hasn’t been any data recovery so far. CloudNordic, on its main page, has posted a notice in Danish indicating how the company has been severely impacted by the assault. The notification further mentions that, despite the grievous repercussions of the incident, they are neither prepared nor inclined to meet the ransom demands of the culprits. Furthermore, attempts to retrieve the compromised data have been futile, suggesting that the data loss might be irreversible.
CloudNordic has communicated that they are liaising with local police agencies, who have counseled them against acceding to the ransom request.
In their collective communication, the companies elaborated that even though all their systems were safeguarded by firewalls and antivirus programs, a few of their servers were compromised by malicious software prior to their relocation between data centers. This resulted in servers that had formerly been on distinct networks becoming connected to the firms’ core network. This network infrastructure, the firms disclosed, “oversees all our servers.” The attackers exploited this to ultimately access and encrypt the main administration and backups of CloudNordic and AzeroCloud.
