The medical technology giant, Olympus, is looking into a “potential cybersecurity issue” that occurred last week and affected parts of its EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) IT systems.
Olympus has been around for almost a century and employs over 31,000 people throughout the world. The firm has long served the life sciences, medical, and industrial equipment industries.
On Saturday, three days after the incident, Olympus issued a statement revealing that the company is investigating a potential cybersecurity issue that impacted certain parts of its EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) IT infrastructure on September 8th, 2021.
When the company learned about the suspicious activity, it immediately organized a specialized response team, including forensics experts. The company is trying to fix this issue as quickly as possible.
The company has suspended data transfers in the impacted systems and also notified the relevant external partners. Olympus is also trying to determine the extent of the damage caused by the attack and will give further information as soon as it becomes available.
Olympus spokesperson clarified that this incident had not harmed customer support, security, and service. The company cannot provide any more information or statements because of the current internal and external investigation.
According to TechCrunch, while Olympus did not reveal the attackers’ identities, ransom notes discovered on computers affected by the hack indicate the BlackMatter ransomware attack.
The same ransom notes contained a link to a Tor website that the BlackMatter gang had used to contact victims in the past. BlackMatter is a new ransomware act that first appeared towards the end of July 2021 and was thought to be a rebrand of DarkSide ransomware.
Later, it was confirmed that the encryption routines of BlackMatter ransomware were the same and unique ones used by DarkSide.
