Hackers hit Luxottica, production stopped at two Italian plants

The Italian eyewear and eyecare giant Luxottica has reportedly suffered a cyber attack that disrupted its operations in Italy and China.

Luxottica Group S.p.A. is an Italian eyewear conglomerate and the world’s largest company in the eyewear industry. As a vertically integrated company, Luxottica designs, manufactures, distributes and retails its eyewear brands, including LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Apex by Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, Target Optical, Eyemed vision care plan, and Glasses.com. Its best known brands are Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. Luxottica also makes sunglasses and prescription frames for designer brands such as Chanel, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Miu Miu, and Tory Burch.

Luxottica employs over 80,000 people and generated 9.4 billion in revenue for 2019.

The company was hit by a cyberattack that took place on Friday evening, when some of the web sites operated by the company were not reachable, including Ray-Ban, Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters, EyeMed, and Pearle Vision.

Some of the Luxottica’s websites (i.e. university.luxottica.com) are currently showing maintenance messages.

Italian media outlets reported that the operations at the plants of Luxottica in Agordo and Sedico (Italy) were disrupted due to a computer system failure. Union sources confirmed that the personnel at the plants received an SMS in which they were notified that “the second workshift of today 21 September is suspended” due to “serious IT problems”.

BleepingComputer website, citing the security firm Bad Packets, speculates that the Italian was using a Citrix ADX controller device vulnerable to the critical CVE-2019-19781 vulnerability in Citrix devices.

At the time Luxottica has yet to release any official statement on the attack.

Security experts believe that threat actor exploited the above flaw to infect the systems at the company with ransomware.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)

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