A cyberattack on Bridgestone Americas, one of the largest manufacturers of tires in the world, has been claimed by the LockBit ransomware gang.
The threat actor announced that they will leak all data stolen from the company and launched a countdown timer, which is currently at less than three hours.
Timer activated
Bridgestone has tens of production units across the world and over 130,000 employees (regular and contractual), as per the company’s data at the end of 2020.
On February 27, Bridgestone started to investigate “a potential information security incident” detected in the morning hours of the same day.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we disconnected many of our manufacturing and retreading facilities in Latin America and North America from our network to contain and prevent any potential impact,” Bridgestone said in a statement to media.
No details about the incident emerged until today when the LockBit ransomware gang claimed the attack by adding Bridgestone Americas to the list of their victims.
LockBit is one of the most active ransomware gangs today, targeting large corporations, sometimes asking for ransoms of tens of millions of U.S. dollars, as was the case with Accenture.
It is unclear what data LockBit stole from Bridgestone or how detrimental leaking it would be to the company. At the time of writing, the countdown from the actor for publishing the files expires in about three hours and a half.
In a report last month, industrial cybersecurity company Dragos notes that LockBit was the most active ransomware actor targeting the industrial sector last year, with 103 attacks, followed by the Conti gang with 63.
The FBI in early February shared technical details and defense tips for LockBit ransomware attacks, noting that a bug in the malware allows showing a hidden debug window to view in real-time the state of data destruction.
source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/bridgestone-americas-confirms-ransomware-attack-lockbit-leaks-data/
