CL0P hacking group hits Swire Pacific Offshore

Swire Pacific Offshore (SPO) announced it has fallen victim to a cyber attack with "some confidential proprietary commercial information" along with personal information believed to be stolen.

The specifics of the attack are unclear but there are suggestions that it has been attacked by the CL0P ransomware group.

SPO has not confirmed if the attack is ransomware-based but CL0P has since updated its blog claiming it has breached SPO's systems.

Full names, locations, phone numbers, company name, bank details, email addresses, and passport scans are among the data stolen seen by IT Pro.

Employees who seem to be most affected are based in Singapore and Malaysia, but some records belong to staff in the UK, China, and the Philippines.

Among the other files stolen are file names alluding to payment advice, mailbox backups, miscellaneous archives, and other personal folders.

The company is the marine services division of the Swire conglomerate and has confirmed the attack has not affected its global operations.

"SPO has taken immediate actions to reinforce existing security measures and to mitigate the potential impact of the incident," it said to IT Pro. "It takes a serious view of any cyberattack or illegal accessing of data or any unlawful action that potentially compromises the privacy or confidentiality of data and will not be threatened by such actions.

"SPO has reported the incident to the relevant authorities and will work closely with them in relation to the incident. SPO is contacting potentially affected parties to inform them about the incident."

Dark web monitoring firm SOS Intelligence drew attention to CL0P's ransomware blog on Wednesday, adding Swire Pacific Offshore to its list of victims.

Cl0P is a sophisticated ransomware gang behind several recent high-profile hacks.

In February this year, Donald Trump's former law firm Jones Day was attacked by CL0P with reports suggesting files were stolen and posted online, just like with the hack on SPO, but the law firm denied the breach.

CL0P is also believed to be behind the months-long attack of Accellion’s File Transfer Application (FTA) product, also in February 2021. Exploiting several zero-day flaws in the legacy IT product, Canada's Bombardier airline was among the most high-profile victim of the attack.

Months later global investment bank Morgan Stanley revealed that personal information belonging to its corporate clients was accessed and stolen in the same Accellion data breach.