Wholesale giant METRO confirmed to have suffered a cyberattack

International cash and carry giant METRO suffered this week IT infrastructure outages following a cyberattack.

International cash and carry giant METRO was hit by a cyberattack that caused IT infrastructure outages. Metro employs more than 95,000 people in 681 stores worldwide, most of them in Germany, its sales reached 24.8 billion euros in 2020.

The outages impacted stores worldwide, the company confirmed the cyber attack in an official statement, it is investigating the incident with the help of external experts:

“METRO/MAKRO is currently experiencing a partial IT infrastructure outage for several technical services. METRO’s IT team, together with external experts, immediately launched a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the service disruption. The latest results of the analysis confirm a cyber attack on METRO systems as the cause of the IT infrastructure outage.” reads the statement issued by the company.

The wholesale giant notified relevant authorities and warned customers that delays might occur due to service disruptions.

In response to the outage, the teams in the stores set up offline systems to process payments.

The company did not provide technical details about the attack, but the problems faced by Metro suggest it was the victim of a ransomware attack.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, cyberattack)

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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”.