Shipping giant MSC discloses a malware-based attack

The shipping giant Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) was victim of a malware-based attack that caused an outage recently.

The shipping giant Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) discloses a malware-based attack that took place on April 10.

The incident affected the company’s data center and took down its website, msc.com, and its myMSC customer and vendor portal.

“The incident was confined to MSC’s headquarters in Geneva only and affected the availability of some of MSC’s digital tools and msc.com for a few days during the Easter holiday long weekend. MSC agencies remained fully functional and continued serving customers as usual during this time.” reads the advisory published by MSC.

“After a thorough investigation, we confirmed that it was confined to a limited number of physical computer systems in Geneva only and we determined that it was a malware attack based on an engineered targeted vulnerability. We have shared as per industry standards the malware with our technology partners so that mitigations could be made available not only to us.”

The company announced that it has resolved the problems and recovered its portals.

The company did not reveal the family of malware that infected its systems, the outage caused by the infection suggests a possible involvement of ransomware.

Fortunately, the incident did not impact the company’s business, MSC confirmed that it is not aware of any data that has been compromised after the security breach.

“During the network outage, MSC’s global agencies and our people around the world continued to serve customers as usual in most cases. All MSC departments, terminals, depots etc. operated without disruptions and the incident posed no threat to parties engaging in business with the company,” continues the advisory.

Other major shipping companies were hit by malware that caused severe losses, including Maersk, COSCO, and Toll Group.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – malware, ransomware)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.