Veolia North America says January ransomware attack affected close to 9,000 customers

American water services giant Veolia North America said it experienced a ransomware attack in January that compromised the sensitive personal information of almost 9,000 individuals.

 

In a press release published in January, Veolia North America said it suffered a “ransomware incident” that  affected some software applications and systems in a portion of its Municipal Water division.

 

The company said it immediately activated its Security Incident Response Teams and its information technology team tried to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

 

“In response to this incident, we implemented defensive measures, including taking the targeted back-end systems and servers offline until they could be restored. As a result, some customers experienced delays when using our online bill payment systems,” the water supplier said.

 

Veolia North America revived its bill payment system within a week of the attack and announced that customers could continue to make regular payments. The company added that payments made during the outage were applied, and customer accounts should reflect the most updated information. The company assured customers that it won’t penalise them for late payments or charge interest on their bills due to the service interruption.

 

“This incident seems to have been confined to our internal back-end systems at Veolia North America, and there is no evidence to suggest it affected our water or wastewater treatment operations,” the company said.

The water services giant added that its preliminary investigation had identified a limited number of individuals whose sensitive personal information was compromised during the incident. The company will contact those individuals and provide additional information and assistance.

 

On February 27, Veolia North America filed a notice of data breach with the Office of the Maine Attorney General, stating that the cyber security incident, which occurred on January 9, compromised the sensitive personal information of 8,951 individuals. 

 

The compromised data included customers’ first and last names, social security numbers, financial information or payment card numbers, dates of birth, government identifications, and driver’s license numbers.

 

“We took proactive steps to mitigate the impact to our Industrial Control Systems (ICS), including our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems (collectively, “Operational Technology”) by severing all connections between our IT Network and Operational Technology network. 

 

“We disabled certain back-end systems in our IT Network, which caused temporary disruptions to certain systems and software (most of these back-end systems have since been restored). Moreover, we forced a reset of all passwords that grant user access to our impacted IT Network. Finally, we implemented additional security measures to fortify our IT Network’s existing security measures and protocols,” reads the notice.

 

The company has urged all affected individuals to remain vigilant, review their credit reports and financial statements on a regular basis, and report suspicious transactions to relevant law enforcement authorities. 

 

It is also offering two years of complimentary credit monitoring, fraud protection, and identity theft insurance Services through Experian to all the individuals affected by the data breach. Also, it has set up a dedicated helpline where affected individuals can call and get their queries answered.