Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

EDP Renewables North America Discloses Data Breach

Renewable energy company EDP Renewables North America (EDPR NA) has started informing customers that its internal systems were breached by cybercriminals.

Renewable energy company EDP Renewables North America (EDPR NA) has started informing customers that its internal systems were breached by cybercriminals.

EDPR NA is part of energy provider EDP Renováveis, which is headquartered in Madrid, Spain, and is a subsidiary of Energias de Portugal, the electric utilities company founded in 1976 by the government of Portugal.

In a notification letter to customers, EDPR NA revealed that its parent company was hit with a ransomware attack on April 13, 2020, which prompted an investigation in which both forensic experts and law enforcement were involved.

On May 8, 2020, EDPR NA learned that the attackers gained “unauthorized access to at least some information stored on the Company’s own information systems.”

The company also says that it has been working on identifying the affected individuals, and that it started sending notification letters “out of an abundance of caution,” although it does not have evidence that the attackers were able to access customers’ personal information.

However, EDPR NA does confirm that it stores on its servers personal information such as names and Social Security numbers.

“We maintain this information in order to make payments to you under the terms of your lease. We do not maintain any of your other personal information, such as your driver’s license number or credit or debit card information,” the notification letter reads.

The EDP Group appears to have been hit by the Ragnar Locker ransomware, with the attackers demanding a $10 million ransom and claiming to have downloaded terabytes of data from the company’s servers.

Ragnar Locker has been observed leveraging various methods of intrusion, including exploits or the targeting of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections, and its operators are known for stealing data from the victims’ environments. In May, the malware started deploying a full virtual machine to evade detection.

Related: Ragnar Locker Ransomware Uses Virtual Machines for Evasion

Related: Try2Cry Ransomware Spreads via USB Drives

Related: Multi-Platform ‘Tycoon’ Ransomware Uses Rare Java Image Format for Evasion

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Data Protection

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

Cybercrime

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...