Crown Equipment confirms a cyberattack disrupted manufacturing

A cyberattack has disrupted operations at Crown Equipment, a manufacturing company based in New Bremen, Ohio. Crown Equipment, the world’s fifth-largest designer and manufacturer of forklifts and material handling equipment, employs approximately 20,000 people globally.

Crown Equipment announced on Tuesday that it had to temporarily shut down due to a cyberattack, which it attributes to “an international cybercriminal organisation.” The company has implemented security measures and collaborated with various officials to mitigate the impact of the attack.

Since approximately June 8th, Crown employees have been reporting that the company was breached and all IT systems were shut down, with employees told not to accept MFA requests and to be wary of phishing emails.

“The company is still working through the disruption caused by the attack and is making progress toward transitioning to normal business operations”, with a planned opening for June 24^th, Crown Equipment stated. “Crown is also working closely with its customers to help reduce the effect the incident may have on their operations.”

They have recently released this statement:

“We know that the evolving situation with the disruption in our IT operations has created many additional questions.

Today, we can confirm that Crown’s IT system was hacked by an international cybercriminal organization which required us to shut down our operating systems so we could investigate and resolve the matter.

While we always want to communicate as timely as possible, in this situation it has been important that we do not provide the hackers information they could use against us.

We determined that many of the security measures Crown had in place were effective in limiting the amount of data the criminals were able to access. We also learned that the hackers gained entry into our system because an employee failed to adhere to our data security policies by allowing unauthorized access to their device.

We are working with some of the world’s best experts in cybersecurity matters and we have enlisted the aid of the FBI. With the help of these experts we are continuing to analyse the data that was affected. So far, we have not seen any signs that the personal information of our employees was targeted or that the information to conduct identity theft was compromised. “

Crown Equipment is currently working on resuming normal operations, although the company has not yet confirmed if any personal data was compromised.

https://www.wdtn.com/news/business/cyberattack-strikes-crown-equipment/