Nearly a month after initially notifying customers of a cyberattack, Canadian electricity company Nova Scotia Power admitted on Friday that it was facing a ransomware attack.
See also: VanHelsing ransomware-as-a-service: Source code leaked
The breach was disclosed by Nova Scotia Power and its parent company, Emera, on April 28, and on May 1 they admitted that hackers had stolen some customer information.
On May 14, Nova Scotia Power notified its customers that data including name, date of birth, phone number, email address, mailing and utility address, electricity usage, service requests, as well as payment, billing and credit history had been breached.
The hackers also gained access to driver's license numbers, Social Insurance Numbers and bank accounts that had been shared for pre-authorized payments. The company stressed that the incident did not cause any disruption to the operation of electricity generation, transmission and distribution facilities.
See also: KeePass: Fake version leads to ransomware infection
In its most recent update, posted on its website on May 23, Nova Scotia Power confirmed that it had been the target of a “sophisticated ransomware attack.”
The company also noted that the perpetrator of the attack has published data stolen from its systems and is currently working with cybersecurity experts to assess the nature and extent of the affected information.
It remains unknown which ransomware group is behind the attack and where the data was published. SecurityWeek has not found any mention of Nova Scotia Power on any of the known ransomware leak sites at the time of writing.
Nova Scotia Power provides electricity to about 550,000 customers and said it is sending notifications about the data breach to about 280,000 of them.
See also: Ransomware gangs use Skitnet malware
Based on the above, the Nova Scotia Power incident highlights how vulnerable even large utilities can be to ransomware attacks. The scale of the breach – with the compromised – shows that such attacks not only threaten privacy, but can also have serious social and economic consequences.
Source: securityweek
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