UPDATED 23:36 EDT / AUGUST 16 2017

INFRA

Shipping giant Maesrk says NotPetya attack cost it up to $300M

The damage costs of the infamous NotPetya malware attack that crippled computer systems worldwide in June may never be fully known, but one victim of the attack has reported how much it cost it — and the number is staggering.

In its interim second-quarter financials released Wednesday, international shipping giant A.P. Moller–Maersk Group put the cost of the NotPetya attack at between $200 million and $300 million.

“In the last week of the quarter we were hit by a cyber-attack, which mainly impacted Maersk Line, APM Terminals and Damco,” Chief Executive Officer Soren Skou said in a statement. “Business volumes were negatively affected for a couple of weeks in July and as a consequence, our Q3 results will be impacted. We expect that the cyber-attack will impact results negatively by USD 200-300m.”

The attack did not stop any of Maersk’s ships, but the company added that it had crippled its internal systems, causing a “business interruption during the shutdown period” that resulted in lost revenue in July. Systems infected included email, internal booking systems and general communications tools. As a result, the company had to use WhatsApp on employee phones to facilitate company communication for the period the systems were down — not exactly an ideal situation for a company that handles 15 percent of all global shipping.

Maersk isn’t the first company to put a figure on how much NotPetya cost them. Drug maker Reckitt Benckiser Group plc putting the cost at £100 ($129 million) in lost revenue, but notably that figure doesn’t include the cost of bringing its systems back online.

Experts have previously said that the cost of ransomware attacks in 2017 could reach $5 billion, but with only two of many victims of NotPetya now accounting for about $400 million, it’s conceivable that the true cost of this one attack could well end up accounting for a good portion of that $5 billion total for the year.

Photo: Reinhard Jahn/Wikimedia Commons

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