Swiss Swish Bish – Runway Sweeper Seller Sabotaged

Aebi Schmidt, Swiss manufacturer of the vehicles that clean and makes runways worldwide safe for planes to land on, has been hit by ransomware, systems going down across company networks following the attack. Manufacturing operations connected to the network were rendered unresponsive, forcing workers to be sent home. 

Aebi Schmidt issues statement and acknowledges some malware problems, but doesn't admit to suffering a ransomware infectionhttps://t.co/XQlrkKkJ9O pic.twitter.com/jNlQ1krLve

— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) April 25, 2019

Ronan David, VP of Business Development at EfficientIP:

“This incident follows on from the $300m attack on Maersk and more recently Arizona Tea which allegedly lost the company millions of dollars a day in sales. Companies should be very aware the ‘we’re too small to be targeted’ mindset is out of date and many don’t realise how much damage can be done. Attackers can bypass firewalls and proxies to exfiltrate over 18,000 credit card numbers per minute using the DNS protocol, or in this case, bring a production line to a grinding halt, if your network is not adequately protected.” 

My recommendation would be that more companies work to protect all business-critical assets connected to their networks. Ransomware normally involves DNS requests at one or more stages of the attack, making it the ideal place to mount a defence. It is essential to use real-time threat intelligence based on DNS analytics to be aware of the dangers out there and identify them, stopping an attack at the DNS level to minimise any damage caused.”