Major comics distributor Diamond is notifying some of its customers of delayed shipments this week as a result of a ransomware attack on their website and computer systems. This weeks FOC has been delayed until tomorrow. FOC was not affected by the outage.
The outage was first noticed on Friday afternoon by retailers. At first it just seemed their website was down but over the weekend Diamond released a statement confirming that it was a ransomware attack and that both their IT department and outside experts are working to solve the problem. Law enforcement has also been notified.
I’m told that more information will be released via an outside website later today – all information is going through extra channels because of the legal issues involved. Although Diamond, like all prominent businesses, had cybersecurity in place, it’s still a very complex procedure to get everything moving again.
Ransomware attacks have become much more common of late, with victims as prominent as Acer and the NBA. More than half of the victims end up paying to recover their sites — although not always successfully. And just today it was announced that US law enforcement has recovered $6 million in ransom collected by REvil, a prominent ransomeware hacker run by Ukrainian nationals.
As for the Diamond attack, is has affected both the Diamond and Alliance websites – the Previewsworld site remains up and running. Some retailers are already reporting delayed shipments this week, adding to the end of the year woes from PRH’s early damages, and supply chain disruption.
Below is the text of the email Diamond sent to retailers late yesterday:
As many of you may know, we are currently experiencing systems issues affecting our order processes and communications. Our IT department and a team of third-party experts are working around the clock to address these issues and restore full operations.
We’ve determined that the systems issues we’re experiencing are the result of a ransomware attack. These attacks have, unfortunately, become increasingly pervasive in recent months, impacting organizations around the world. We want to assure you that customer data and financial information is not stored on our network and as such we have no reason to believe it has been impacted by this attack.
In addition to the investigation underway by our team of third-party forensic experts, we’ve also notified law enforcement.
While some of our systems remain down, rest assured we are continuing to ship product and fill orders to the greatest extent we can. Our retailer services portal is online and available for FOC this evening and tomorrow.
Thank you for your patience as we work to restore full operations as quickly as possible. We’re grateful for your support and will share updates with you as we have them.
For those who like to find black humor in such situations, there are the responses to this tweet by retailer Ryan Higgins.
