U.K. postal giant Royal Mail announces that it has reinstated international shipping following an attack by ransomware that shut down its export service for more than an entire month.
Royal Mail spokesperson Mark Street said to TechCrunch the following day that the company has reinstated export services internationally to all countries that can be purchased online or in Post Office branches. “We are now processing close to normal daily volumes of international export mail with some delays,” Street explained. In an update on the incident of 23 February Royal Mail noted a “small number” of untracked international services for customers with business contracts are still experiencing some delays.
Royal Mail faced severe disruption for six weeks following an attack on the internet on January 10 that affected the business’s ability to deliver certain items to overseas destinations. Although the company had restored many online services over the past months, Royal Mail could not until now, take care of international parcels in the 11,000 Post Office branches.
Royal Mail faced severe disruption for six weeks following an attack on the internet on January 10 that affected the business’s ability to deliver certain items to overseas destinations. Although the company had restored many online services over the past months, Royal Mail could not until now, take care of international parcels in the 11,000 Post Office branches.
Royal Mail Restores Global Shipping Weeks
According to BBC, Royal Mail ships to 231 countries and territories around the world and delivered over 150 million packages abroad over the course of the year.
Royal Mail’s long-awaited update to its service is scheduled to be released on the same day that the Russia-linked LockBit ransomware gang that has notable victims include NHS vendor Advanced as well as Advanced the stolen data from Royal Mail on its dark leak website. The notorious ransomware gang first threatened to make public all the stolen information on the 9th of February.
The data dump of 45 gigabytes released by LockBit and scrutinized by TechCrunch It doesn’t seem to contain sensitive financial or customer data, although it does include at the very least one employee’s COVID-19 vaccine information.
“Royal Mail is aware that an unauthorized third party has published some data allegedly obtained from our network,” Street spoke to TechCrunch. “At this point in our inquiry, we are convinced the majority of the data is composed of program files for technical purposes and administrative business records. Evidence suggests that the data is not containing any financial data or other sensitive information about customers. We will continue to cooperate in conjunction with the law enforcement authorities.”
In the last week, LockBit released what they claimed to be the complete details of its talks in negotiations with Royal Mail, which included an initial ransom of $80 million demand for the provision of the decryption software and stop the release of information. LockBit then lowered its demands by $40 million. It’s unclear whether Royal Mail paid any of the ransom. The spokesperson of Royal Mail (Street) did not confirm.
LockBit in January declared an attack on Ion Group, a Dublin-based software firm that assists financial institutions to streamline their essential business processes. The group threatened to release information that was stolen from the firm the day of February 4 but Ion hasn’t yet shown up on the leak site of LockBit.
It’s not clear if Ion paid the ransom request of LockBit It’s also not determined how much or the types of data were taken from the company.
