We have been reading about towns in Florida being attacked by ransomware recently. Hackers use this malware to lock down the town’s data and don’t give it back until a ransom is paid in bitcoin. The very same thing has happened to Eurofins Scientific, the United Kingdom’s largest police forensics lab contractor. It has also paid a ransom to hackers in order to regain access to its data which had been encrypted by the ransomware.
According to the BBC, the ransomware attack took place last month and the Brussels-based company had confirmed the incident in a press release the following day, calling it a “new version of malware.”
The hack had caused a disruption to many of its IT systems in several countries. It did add, though, that internal and external IT forensics experts hadn’t found any evidence of data being stolen.
Eurofins Scientific sent out a press release on June 24th to confirm that it had started to recover from the incident but didn’t say whether a ransom had been paid or if it was simply restoring data from backups. Today’s report suggests that the company did indeed pay a ransom to the hackers and then restored its systems using the decryption key that the hackers had sent. It is unclear just how much in ransom the company paid.
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