Luxembourg-based laboratory testing services giant Eurofins Scientific reportedly paid the ransom demanded by cybercriminals following a successful ransomware attack that led to the company taking offline many of its systems and servers.
Eurofins is an important provider of food, pharma and environmental laboratory testing services. The company, which also offers cybersecurity services through Eurofins Digital Testing, employs roughly 45,000 people for its more than 800 laboratories in 47 countries.
The company revealed in early June that some of its IT systems had been infected with a piece of ransomware; a new variant that evaded its cybersecurity solutions.
A few weeks later, the organization reported making good progress in restoring disrupted systems and attempted to minimize the impact of the incident, highlighting that there had been no evidence that confidential client data had been stolen.
“As of Monday June 17th, the vast majority of affected laboratories’ operations had been restored,” Eurofins stated in a press release issued in June 24. “The production and reporting IT systems of essentially all those that remained became operational again during the past week. Restoration operations are continuing for some less important back office and software development systems as well as in a few companies (representing less than 2% of the Group’s revenues) some specific procedures required before restart of certain activities that are anticipated to be completed by end of next week.”
However, the BBC reported on Friday that Eurofins had actually paid a ransom to the cybercriminals who targeted its systems. While the amount is unknown, it’s believed the ransom was paid sometime between June 10 and June 24.
SecurityWeek has reached out to Eurofins for confirmation and will update this article if the organization responds.
According to the BBC, Eurofins is the UK’s biggest provider of forensic services, used in over 70,000 investigations every year. Police and other law enforcement agencies in the country stopped sending samples to Eurofins following the incident and court hearings have been reportedly postponed due to analysis results from Eurofins not being available.
Several important organizations have been hit by ransomware over the past year, including COSCO, Norsk Hydro, the UK Police Federation, and Aebi Schmidt.
UPDATE. Eurofins pointed SecurityWeek to its press releases and provided the following statement: “Forensics investigations with the relevant authorities are ongoing so we cannot comment on speculative reports at this time.”
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