158-year-old company collapses after staff set weak passwords
- 24 thg 7, 2025
- 2 phút đọc
Knights of Old (KNP), a long-established shipping company, was forced to close after a ransomware attack in 2023.
This week's BBC Panorama programme recounts the KNP incident, which took place in mid-2023, to warn of the dangers of ransomware.
The Akira cybercrime group is believed to have accessed KNP's systems using an easy-to-guess password used by an employee. The hackers then encrypted and locked KNP's operational data, telling them the only way to unlock it was to pay a ransom. The ransom note read: "If you are reading this, your company's internal infrastructure has been partially or completely destroyed... Please hold back your tears and resentment and try to have a constructive dialogue."
KNP had purchased cyber-attack insurance. Paul Cashmore, CEO of insurance provider Solace Global, said a cyber crisis response team was quickly dispatched to assist and determined that all of KNP’s data had been encrypted. All servers, backups, and disaster recovery systems were destroyed. The company was in a worst-case scenario where all of its endpoints were compromised.
The hackers' demand was estimated by experts to be as high as £5 million ($6.74 million), far beyond KNP's ability to pay. As a result, the company decided to close permanently, unable to recover its data. Around 500 trucks were taken off the road and 700 people lost their jobs almost overnight.
Cybersecurity experts have long warned about the importance of strong, complex passwords and multi-factor authentication, and the KNP case shows the consequences of underestimating the severity of a single bug, according to the Economic Times.
Some ethical hackers recommend the old-fashioned security of writing down passwords on pen and paper. Microsoft is also phasing out some password-saving features, acknowledging that passwords alone are no longer secure enough.
Thu Thao (According to Tom's Hardware, Economic Times)
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