MEDITERRANEAN Shipping Company has confirmed a website outage over the Easter break was a malware or cyberattack.
The company has issued a statement seeking to answer key questions, noting that the outage, focused on the company’s headquarters in Geneva, had now been resolved and all internal systems were fully functional.
Answering the question as to whether this was a cyberattack, the company responded in the affirmative.
“After a thorough investigation, we confirmed that it was confined to a limited number of physical computer systems in Geneva only and we determined that it was a malware attack based on an engineered targeted vulnerability,” the company stated.
“We have shared as per industry standards the malware with our technology partners so that mitigations could be made available not only to us.
“We will not be commenting further in detail on this point, as this would be counter-productive from a security perspective.”
MSC denied any data had been lost or compromised.
“After a thorough investigation, we are not aware at this time of any lost or compromised data as a result of this incident,” the company stated.
“We will remain in touch with individual customers and partners to discuss or address any specific concerns, should a need ever arise, as we fully appreciate the importance of data protection.”
MSC stated the incident was confined to its Geneva headquarters so for most parts of their business it had “only a limited impact”.
“We worked hard around the clock to fix this incident and to provide alternative solutions for any customers who temporarily could not place a booking,” the company stated.
“We also provided regular updates on the incident via our social media channels and directly to our customers, including on how they could continue to make bookings. “We were able to keep cargo flowing around the world despite this incident.”
