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Switzerland Based MCH Group Hit by a Cyber Attack

 

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the international live marketing company - MCH Group was hit by a criminal cyber-attack deploying malware on Wednesday, 20th of October 2021. The Swiss event organizer and marketing firm announced that it has been striving to restore system functionality as soon as possible. 

The multinational marketing and events organization is well-known for its trade shows Baselworld and Art Basel. 

The MCH firm announced in a statement released on Thursday 21st of October that it had been the target of a malware assault the day before. 

Also with the assistance of external experts and federal officials, company IT specialists sought to reduce the damage. An inquiry has been conducted to establish whether or not any information was taken. 

According to the firm, the occurrence doesn't jeopardize present events, and therefore future trade shows may go as scheduled. Neither any ransom was asked. the MCH organization has stated that it would pursue criminal proceedings against the criminals.

“The internal ICT specialists, together with other external experts and the federal authorities, immediately took measures to limit the damage as far as possible,” it said in a statement. “As part of this process, it will be investigated if any data have been siphoned.” 

The MCH group was formed in 2001 by the merging of two firms that administered fairs in Basel and Zurich, respectively. It is listed on the stock exchange, although major shares are owned by public authorities. 

It employed 710 individuals at the end of December, 355 of them were based in Switzerland. The coronavirus epidemic drove the corporation into the red in 2020, but it is looking for a comeback with fresh finance and initiatives. 

Cyber-attacks on official bodies and commercial enterprises are also on the rise in Switzerland, albeit not all occurrences are made public. 

On Thursday, it was also revealed that cybercriminals had hacked into the official Easygov system and taken the identities of around 130,000 businesses that had requested urgent financial credit during the epidemic. Authorities claim that no critical information was compromised. 

The municipal authority of the Swiss town of Montreux, Stadler Rail, and the price comparison website Comparis have also been attacked, and the personal data of the whole inhabitants of Rolle was purportedly published online in August.

Ransomware Hackers Target Popular Cloud Service Provider 'Swiss Cloud'

 

Swiss Cloud, a Switzerland-based cloud hosting provider, suffered a ransomware attack that seriously impacted its server infrastructure. The incident took place on Tuesday, April 27, according to Swiss Cloud’s status page. 

The company, which is one of Switzerland’s major hosting providers, said on Friday in an update posted on its website that it’s working to restore affected servers from existing backups. 

“After the cyber-attack on April 27, work is proceeding to clean up the systems and restore normal operations at swiss cloud computing ag. The backup systems can be used for recovery. Parts of the complex server network affected by the attack must first be cleaned up individually and reconfigured with the corresponding temporal effects. The work to clean up and restore the servers, for which swiss cloud computing ag is supported by specialists from the system partners of HPE and Microsoft, gives reason to be confident that the systems will be available again in the coming week. The work will also continue on weekends in 24-hour shifts.” reads a statement posted by the company on its website. 

More than 6,500 clients affected

While the incident did not affect the company’s entire server infrastructure—spread among different data centers across Switzerland, the disruption has impacted server availability for more than 6,500 customers. One of the most high-profile customers impacted by Swiss Cloud’s outage is Sage, a company that delivers payroll and HR software for German-speaking nations. 

However, while the company might be confident regarding the timeline of its recovery plan, similar ransomware attacks have also taken place at other cloud and web hosting providers over the past few years. In most cases, recovery efforts lasted weeks, not days. This includes incidents at Managed.com, Equinix, CyrusOne, Cognizant, X-Cart, A2 Hosting, SmarterASP.NET, Dataresolution.net, iNSYNQ, and Internet Nayana, just to name the larger attacks. 

Web hosting and cloud infrastructure providers are not particularly targeted by the ransomware groups, but once they’re breached, they usually face some of the largest ransom demands. This is because even the smallest downtime they suffer trickles down to all their customers, and providers face immense pressure to restore services from all sides. This pressure is also why some companies choose to pay the ransom demand even if they have backups.