U.K. water supplier disrupted in Cl0p ransomware attack

South Staffordshire Water, a British company that supplies clean water to 1.6 million consumers, has confirmed that they were disrupted by a cyberattack. Fortunately, the attack only affected office IT systems and did not impact the water distribution systems, so the water supply is safe.

Interestingly, the Cl0p ransomware group publicly claimed to have compromised Thames Water at around the same time. This water supplier is the largest in the UK, and responsible for distributing water to 15 million consumers in the greater London area. Thames Water issued a denial that any such breach had occurred.

Cl0p published a portion of what they claim to be 5 TB of stolen data on their leak site. Analysis of these leaked documents showed that Cl0p mixed up their intended target, and was in fact responsible for the attack on South Staffordshire Water. The gang has since corrected their mistake on the leak site.

The multi-level protection engine in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud blocks backdoors and other malware commonly used in such attacks. The Advanced Data Loss Prevention pack monitors access to your data and helps to prevent any data exfiltration.