Below is an excerpt from the article on Toll Group as published on Financial Review (afr.com).
Freight delivery giant Toll Group is battling to fully restore its services after a crippling cyber attack, which security experts say is the most significant in Australian corporate history, as it faces growing discontent from clients including Telstra, Officeworks and Footlocker.
However, Jonathan Sharrock, the managing director of Cyber Citadel, which provides services to clients in the logistics, education and pharmaceuticals sectors, said on some occasions organisations see few alternatives.
Earlier this month The University of Maastricht in Holland said it had paid hackers bitcoin worth €200,000 ($322,600) to unlock its systems from a Christmas Eve attack. It said it had considered the alternative option of rebuilding its entire IT network from scratch, and probably losing significant amounts of research, and decided to pay.
“It’s not great, but they paid it and now they’re back to normal. But even doing that you don’t know if you really got rid of them from your environment and would need to get some forensic people in … and that is costly,” Mr Sharrock said.
“It is not guaranteed, but if a company pays the ransom then systems usually do come back online,” Mr Sharrock said. “The organisations behind the attacks now act like businesses and they want to run good customer service, whereby if you pay up they want it to go smoothly, otherwise people wouldn’t deal with them.”
Full article published in Financial Review (afr.com) – 17 February 2020 (paid content) Toll faces customer fallout after cyber attack (afr.com)
