Sports equipment and sportswear brand Mizunohas faced order delays and disruption to its operations following a ransomware attack.
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Mizuno is a Japanese sports equipment and sporting goods company with more than 3,800 employees and stores across Asia, Europe and North America.
The company sells a wide variety of sporting goods, but is best known for its golf clubs, running shoes, and baseball equipment.
Mizuno appears to have fallen victim to a ransomware attack over the weekend of February 4th, targeting its US corporate network.
This cyberattack led to significant disruption to the company's operations, including interruptions in telephone communications, delays in product shipments, and website issues.
Customers began noticing the malfunction last Tuesday, when the company's phone systems were no longer working and the website began displaying a message warning of order delays.
“MIZUNO IS EXPERIENCED A SYSTEM OUTAGE. THERE MAY BE ORDER DELAYS,” reads a notice at the top of the mizunousa.com.
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Customers who tried to click the Contact on the website saw messages saying there was an error connecting to that part of the website.
Mizuno support representatives informed customers that their internal systems were down and that they could no longer search for existing orders.
This was further confirmed by users on the Golf RWX posting similar experiences after the discontinuation.
Other customers said they were told that shipping was delayed as Mizuno was unable to print shipping labels and that orders could be delayed by up to a month.
The ransomware attack couldn't have come at a worse time for Mizuno, as it had just released the Mizuno Pro 221, 223, and 225 golf clubs on February 3, which many customers had pre-ordered and eagerly awaited.
The outage is also affecting Mizuno resellers, who can no longer access the company's B2B "Direct Connect" website, which is used to place orders.
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For its part, Mizuno has not commented on the entire incident, nor has it publicly explained what is causing the delays and outages for a week.
It is currently unknown which ransomware gang is behind the attack, but if the company does not pay a ransom, we will likely find out at a later date if the hackers publish its stolen data.
