CMA CGM is the world’s fourth largest liner – the top three, Maersk, MSC and Cosco, have all suffered hacks in recent years, leading to massive losses.
A couple of weeks ago, CMA CGM was hit by a ransomware cyber attack, and for almost two weeks, a number of the group’s websites have been down or partially operating, which paralyzed most of it’s operations worldwide.
On October 12th confirmed that the company’s e-commerce sites have resumed operations with all their main functionalities up and running. A number of CMA CGM’s websites went down, the culprit later revealed as the ransomware Ragnar Locker. The French carrier later announced that in addition it might have suffered a data breach. CMA CGM became the latest name in container shipping to be hit by a cyber attack, with leading liners Maersk, MSC and Cosco all being hit in recent years.
Ragnar Locker is a ransomware that affects devices running Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was initially detected late last year. Victims of the malware to date include Portugal’s leading electricity company and American travel management firm, CWT, the latter paying hackers $4.5m in July to retrieve sensitive data.
In a press release CMA CGM said ” All communications to and from the CMA CGM Group are secure, including emails, transmitted files and electronic data interchanges. All our agencies as well as our back-office are now fully operational. The CMA CGM Group would like to thank its customers and partners for their understanding, their trust and their support”.
It’s so hard to be in this huge industry and have lots of partners and customers that rely on you for shipments and you get hit by such a massive hack attack. Part of the customers in the US felt the hit for the two weeks absence of CMA CGM and were unable to process and fulfil their shipping containers delivery orders. Especially the businesses all across the country that sell and deliver shipping containers, were unable to get the boxes from the depots, even if they were there, because CMA CGM could not see what is available and what is not, making deliveries impossible for this whole time. Now slowly they are getting back on track, setting new delivery dates and updating all customers to stand by till every unfulfilled order is prioritized and delivered.
