On the evening of 24th local time, the system of India’s SpiceJet airline was attacked by ransomware, causing many flights to be delayed and stranding hundreds of passengers at the airport on the morning of 25th.
At noon on the 25th, SpiceJet Airlines announced through its social media accounts that the technical team had fixed the system and the flights had resumed normal operation. However, the stranded passengers said that the ground staff told them that the server was still out of service. One stranded passenger said his flight was scheduled to depart at around 6 a.m., but he did not receive a takeoff notice until after the airline issued the announcement, and waiting passengers complained.
As of now, SpiceJet Airlines has not disclosed any details of the attack, and the source and cause of the ransomware attack remains unknown.
SpiceJet is India’s second largest airline, with 102 aircraft, flying to more than 60 cities, employing more than 14,000 people and holding 15 percent of India’s market share. The cyber attack affected a large number of passengers in India and abroad, causing huge financial losses.
This is not the first time SpiceJet has suffered a cyber attack. in January 2020, SpiceJet admitted to a data breach in which the personal information of more than 1.2 million passengers was compromised in an unencrypted manner.
With the growth of the Internet, cyber attacks are nothing new and any industry can be a target for hackers. Data and information are intangible assets of a company and are vulnerable to ransomware attacks, especially in the airline industry mentioned above, where data security runs through all aspects of passenger information, flight information, and aircraft operations control.
Therefore, backup and recovery is the top priority to ensure enterprise data security and business continuity, and it is also the best choice to prevent and solve ransomware attacks.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery has multiple virtual machine backup solutions to minimize the impact on production systems and business networks, improve the transmission efficiency of backup data, save backup data storage space, and provide the ability to recover the corresponding virtual machines and their data at that point in time within seconds and resume business system operation at minutes, without any impact on the original backup data throughout the process, minimizing the impact caused by disasters or failures The whole process does not have any impact on the original backup data, minimizing the interruption of core business caused by disaster or failure and ensuring the safety of the original backup data.
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