Expeditors International, a global supply chain firm, suffers a cyber attack
8th March 2022
On February 20th, Expeditors International, a global freight company, suffered a cyberattack.
In response, the company initiated crisis management and business continuity plans and shut down most of its business operations. This has hindered the company in multiple areas, including arranging shipping freight, managing customs, and distributing activities for customer shipments.
Expeditors made this announcement when they reported their fourth-quarter financial results but provided no additional information.
Currently, the company has limited information on the cyberattack, but they said that they are working with global cybersecurity experts to manage the situation.
The company also said that they were working towards restarting normal operations.
As of March 2022, Expeditors began to handle shipments though they have yet to recover from the setback. Moreover, they are yet to determine the cause behind the cyber attacks.
Based out of Seattle, Expeditors International is a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries and employing over 18,000 people to provide logistics, freight-forwarding and customs services for airfreight and ocean shipping. Last year, the company brought in $16.5 billion in revenue.
Attacks on the supply chain firms have been growing
The attack on the US-based company is one of the more significant and more recent incidents in a series of cyberattacks on logistics firms.
In December of last year, German-based Hellman Worldwide was hit by an attack. While Swissport suffered a cyberattack on February 2022, leading to outages and causing a cyber attack.
According to Intel 471, a cybercrime intelligence firm warned that cybercriminals have been selling network access of several logistics firms, which could be used to stage a cyberattack.
While it is difficult to draw any conclusive connections between the statement made by Intel 471 and the attacks on logistics providers, we can, however, conclude that logistics firms have come under heavy pressure to keep data and operations safe from cybercriminals.
How can organisations avoid cyber-attacks?
It is now apparent that organisations in this industry need to invest in robust and well-intergrated solutions to strengthen their cybersecurity ecosystem. But in order to make informed decisions in this landscape, it is vital that these organisations identify vulnerabilities in their security infrastructure. This would help them find and mitigate security threats at an early stage whilst protecting their digital assets and infrastructure.
How RiskXchange can help
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