Pierluigi Paganini May 19, 2020

The Australian flat product steel producer BlueScope Steel Limited was hit by a cyberattack that caused disruptions to some of its operations.

Australian steel producer BlueScope was recently hit by a cyberattack that disrupted some of its operations.

The incident was spotted on Friday at one of its businesses located in the US, but the company did not share any detail about the attack.

“BlueScope today confirmed that its IT systems have been affected by a cyber incident, causing disruptions to parts of the Company’s operations. Our North Star, Asian and New Zealand businesses are continuing largely unaffected with minor disruptions.” reads the statement published by the company. “In Australia, manufacturing and sales operations have been impacted; some processes have been paused, whilst other processes including steel despatches continue with some manual processes and workarounds.”

The problems faced by the company are usually the result of a ransomware attack, the suspect is confirmed by iTnews that said the incident was caused by this family of malware and that is restoring systems from backups.

“BlueScope Steel is suffering IT “disruption” that is believed to be the result of a ransomware infection, impacting production systems used by its global operations.” reads a post published by iTnews. “iTnews has learned that production systems were halted company-wide in the early hours of Thursday morning, though recovery from backup was understood to be progressing on Thursday afternoon.”

BlueScope confirmed that the security incident impacted some of its IT systems. Manufacturing and sales operations in Australia were deeply impacted.

“In the affected areas the Company has reverted to manual operations where possible while it fully assesses the impact and remediates as required, in order to return to normal operations as quickly as possible.” continues the post.

Recently another Australian giant was hit by ransomware, the transportation and logistics giant Toll disclosed a security incident.

In May, Toll Group informed its customers that it has shut down some IT systems after a new ransomware attack, it is the second infection disclosed by the company this year.

Toll staff discovered the infection after noticing unusual activity on some servers, further investigation revealed the presence of the Nefilim ransomware.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – BlueScope, hacking)

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