Data centre provider Equinix hit by ransomware
Early investigations suggest the attack is limited to the company's own internal systems
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.
RELATED RESOURCE
The trusted data centre
Best practices and business results for organisations based in Europe
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.
-
Companies are still paying ransoms to cyber criminals despite official adviceNews A Proofpoint survey found evolving ransomware techniques and the use of AI is exacerbating the situation for victims
-
This one cyber crime group accounted for nearly a fifth of all ransomware attacks in JuneNews The Gentlemen, a ransomware a service operator, now accounts for 17% of published attacks
-
Working with the enemy: Ransomware negotiator-turned cyber criminal jailed after working with hackers to extort clientsNews Angelo Martino was supposed to be negotiating on behalf of victims, but was secretly working for ransomware operators
-
Hackers are posing as Interpol to target small businesses – here's what you need to knowNews Small businesses are warned to think twice before clicking on links
-
‘Every hour ransomware goes undetected drastically increases its potential blast radius’: Hackers are breaching networks and laying low for longer – and nearly half of firms don’t realize until data is stolenNews An ExtraHop survey found more intrusions are going undetected, leading to longer dwell times
-
Ransomware cartels are fragmenting into volatile splinter groups, warns Met Police cyber chiefNews Commoditized "cyber crime bazaars" and AI data mining are forcing law enforcement to rewrite its playbook
-
New ransomware threat group, The Gentlemen, has become one of the most active ransomware operators, accounting for 10% of all attacksNews NTT researchers warn that the RaaS group is leveraging SystemBC malware to establish covert tunnelling, evade detection, and support rapid lateral movement across enterprise environments
-
Instructure chose to a pay ransom following the Canvas cyber attack – research shows more than half of security leaders would follow suitAnalysis Opting to pay ransoms creates huge risks for enterprises – you’re relying on the word of criminals
