The biggest natural gas supplier in Greece, DESFA, stated on Saturday that a hack had resulted in a limited range data breach and also an IT system outage.
DESFA revealed that hackers tried to access its network but were blocked by the prompt response of its IT department in a statement sent to the public and distributed to regional news sources on Saturday.
Even if the network breach was minor, some documents and information were accessed and may have “leaked.”
To protect the data of its customers, DESFA turned off some of its online services. However, as professionals strive to carefully restore these services, they will gradually resume their regular activities.
The gas supply won’t be impacted by this mishap, and DESFA guarantees its customers that all input and output points are functioning at their full capacity.
The corporation claims it has notified the national data protection office, the ministry of energy and environment, the national defense department, and the police’s cybercrime unit in order to handle the issue with the least amount of delay and loss.
Finally, DESFA claims that it will never negotiate a ransom payment and that it has a strong policy against doing so.
Ragnar Locker takes responsibility
The ransomware operation Ragnar Locker, a threat actor that started operations more than 2 years ago and has had multiple high-profile cyberattacks in 2021, revealed data on Friday, which led to the verification of the attack.
Even though its volume has decreased from previous years, Ragnar Locker is still operational in 2022. As of January 2022, a recent FBI study connected Ragnar Locker to 52 network intrusions in crucial U.S. infrastructure entities.
On their data leak portal, the threat actors published a list of supposedly stolen material along with a limited collection of stolen documents that don’t seem to contain any classified information.
Ragnar Locker also claims that as part of their extortion attempt, they discovered numerous security flaws on DESFA’s systems and alerted them of them. The threat actors allegedly ignored them, though.
If the victimized firm doesn’t comply with the ransomware perpetrators’ demands, they’ll publish every file associated with the file tree.
This strike comes at a difficult time for European gas suppliers as all of the continent’s nations opted to abruptly reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas, which unavoidably led to issues.
Energy shortages, power outages, rationing, and skyrocketing energy costs are predicted for the forthcoming winter, making consumers even more susceptible to ransomware cyberattacks on gas suppliers.
