Data centre provider Equinix hit by ransomware

US data centre provider Equinix has been rocked by a major security incident, with some of its internal company systems compromised by ransomware.

The company revealed yesterday that its security teams took immediate action against the threat, notified law enforcement agencies, and are continuing to investigate the nature and scale of the infection.

The severity of the attack at this stage is unclear, with the company pledging to release further details soon. Thankfully for its customers, however, Equinix data centres and services, including its managed services, remained fully operational during the period of the attack, according to a statement released by the company.

“Equinix is currently investigating a security incident we detected that involves ransomware [on] some of our internal systems,” the company said.

“Note that as most customers operate their own equipment within Equinix data centers, this incident has had no impact on their operations or the data on their equipment at Equinix.”

Equinix provides an array of data centre and networking services for businesses, including data centre design, as well as colocation, which is the practice of housing privately-owned equipment in third-party data centres.

With internal systems kept separate from those that run many of the external services and from customers’ equipment housed in its data centres, the risk of the attack spilling over is said to be minimal, according to Equinix. Services are largely operating as normal at the time of writing.

There have been a number of high profile ransomware attacks in recent months, with a swathe of IT services companies similarly on the receiving end, in addition to high profile organisations like Canon and Honda.

Industry giant Cognizant, for example, recently experienced service disruptions for some of its clients. The IT services firm was targeted with Maze ransomware in April, with the incident costing the company around $70 million.

The attack on Equinix has similar hallmarks to one on CyrusOne in December 2019. In that instance, the company did sustain a degree of service disruption, with the attack affecting six customers served from one data centre based in New York.