The Credit Union National Association or CUNA, which represents the state and federally chartered credit unions in the United States, was hit by an alleged ‘cyber incident’ leading to knocked systems.
The Washington, DC, headquartered company announced Monday, Feb. 3 that all its system went offline as a result of ransomware. A source familiar with the incident said the target of the ransomware is the company’s Microsoft software, where names, business addresses, and email addresses were stored.
CUNA assured the public that no Social Security numbers or credit card numbers were stored in the Microsoft software. “Based on our investigation to date, we have no evidence to suggest that any data in our system, such as names, businesses addresses, and email addresses, have been accessed,” stated CUNA.
Meanwhile, company spokesperson Vicky Christner wouldn’t confirm whether or not the ransomware is the cause of the outage. Christner said the organization is already handling the incident and the outage was caused by a ‘business disruption issue.’ Additionally, CUNA posted on its website that the outage is a ‘technical issue’ of its systems.
Microsoft software is believed to be the target of ransomware, according to Christner. CUNA is looking at its system for other vulnerabilities. The investigation is still ongoing as per the company spokesperson.
Ransomware Attacks
CUNA is not the first one to experience a ransomware attack. Last year, aluminum manufacturer Aebi Schmidt was hit by a glitch that knocked off its system for days. The company announced that a ‘virus’, which paralyzed the internal network and manufacturing operations systems, caused the system issue.
Shipping company Pitney Bowes also got hit by a ransomware attack in October 2019, encrypting information on its system. Client services were unavailable for days after the malware attack.
Even Arizona Beverages was also hit by ransomware in April last year, affecting all its networks and hundreds of Windows computers and servers. The same message popped up in the company’s computers saying, “Your network was hacked and encrypted.” Arizona Beverages has more than 200 servers and network computers affected due to the ransomware.
The system attacks target small to huge enterprises, disrupting not only services but also affect the overall system in place. Businesses are vulnerable to these attacks because of the lack of security layers in place.
The Credit Union National Association is the only national association that advocates the credit union in the United States.
