Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker has halted production at all of its plants in Japan after a ransomware attack on a key supplier. This marks another major enterprise casualty as hackers continue to see rising success with ransomware attacks.
EXPERT COMMENTS
The Toyota breach highlighted that no company is off limits. At first, Toyota might seem like a highly secure environment that it would not likely be a target, but impacting operations to a global company like Toyota can have a catastrophic impact to the supply chain. If Toyota cannot purchase, receive, deliver and service product, a large part of the economy would come to a halt. Most of the public information says this ransomware isn’t damaging and Toyota is still investigating the impact. All Toyota is saying right now is no customer data was hacked.
Typically, in situations like this “No customer data hacked” will put the public at ease. Unfortunately, for a company that size with worldwide operations, that thread can be pulled to reveal a lot more.
Steve Tcherchian
CISO, XYPRO, Chief Product Officer
It’s unknown how long the perpetrators were embedded in Toyota’s network. The average time to detect a breach is currently at 200+ days. Assuming with that much time on the Toyota’s network and systems, a lot of damage could have been done in terms of compromising company and employee data. Given the tight privacy regulations in Japan, this could make for an interesting next few weeks. Watching this one very closely.
