Today’s blog post is on the Bridgestone Americas. The big tire manufacturer has come out that they had to shut down because of a cyber-attack, so let’s get into get into what's going on at Bridgestone.
Bridgestone manufacturers tires for cars and agricultural vehicles, major tire manufacturer and retreading company in, around the world. Unfortunately, their North America and Latin America facilities have been shut down due to a cyber-attack. Over at Bridgestone Americas it's currently investigating a potential information security incident, and this is a statement that they released today, February 28th, 2022. They said since learning of the potential incident in the early morning hours of February 27th, we have launched a comprehensive investigation to quickly gather facts while working to ensure the security of our IT systems.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we disconnected many of our manufacturing and retreading facilities in Latin America and North America from our network to contain and prevent any potential impact. Until we learn more from this investigation, we cannot determine with certainty the scope or nature of any potential incident, but we will continue to work diligently to address any potential issues that may affect our operations, our data, our teammates, and our customers,” the company has said.
Number one, this is obviously written by a lawyer. Probably at some point a breach attorney or some form of legal has gone through this message that has come out. Most of the time companies come out and say the wrong thing but, in this case, it is the right thing to say. Although, this is not saying much because they've just recently discovered within the last 24 hours that they've had a problem. There are reports on Twitter and on other news articles out there that state that the plants around the United States have shut down, and people were being sent home as early as Sunday. Bridgestone has taken their systems offline, and this is what happens.
This is what you can learn as a business person or somebody who's in charge of managing the IT for a company that when an event like this happens, regardless if it's ransomware or not, you have to take these systems offline. You have to disconnect them from the internet until you really know the scope and what has been impacted. Then you can start bringing systems back up and running. Now we have no word yet on whether this is a ransomware attack or just some kind of network intrusion that they detected along the way and decided to shut things down. If you have any information, or if you're a Bridgestone employee and you know what might be going on, or you've seen ransomware screens, hit us up in the comments or just message us and let us know what you are seeing. We'd like to at least get an idea if Bridgestone was hit with ransomware.
Cyber experts know that they are expecting Russians and Russian actors to do criminal activities to US businesses. So, maybe this could be one of the big businesses that got hit. However, experts do know that there are many medium size and small businesses that are getting hit all the time. Bridgestone is a big name, a big company. Then you might be sitting here thinking, well, what could Bridgestone, a tire company possibly have? What could they want? Well, number one, they have money, so the cyber criminals will go after that. More than likely, cyber experts would predict that the data that was probably taken was either proprietary or was a lot of employee data, and employee data is very rich data in terms of what you can use that for, for identity fraud, and theft, and credit fraud. There's a lot of different things that can happen here, and this is another lesson that you can learn.
If you sit here and tell yourself that you don't have any data that anybody would want, if you have employees, you have data that somebody wants. It's just that simple. You might not think of it in those terms. You may think, well, we don't collect any data for our customers. We just build X, Y, and Z. We don't store any information, no payment information, but if you have employees, you have enough data there where if you don't protect that and it gets in the hands of the wrong people, they can do a lot of different things with that, including calling your employees and threatening them.
So, Bridgestone is under a cyber-attack. They had to shut down their operations. As many people have seen with many cyber-attacks recently where operations are just completely shut down, Bridgestone is shut down. Many workers have been sent home. Many workers at Bridgestone are impacted by this, and we'll bring you updates as soon as we have them on what's going on.
