The global shipping and mailing services company Pitney Bowes revealed that the recent partial outage was caused by the Ryuk ransomware.

The global shipping and mailing services company Pitney Bowes recently suffered a partial outage of its service caused by a ransomware attack. Pitney Bowes is a global technology company that provides commerce solutions in the areas of ecommerce , shipping, mailing, data and financial services.

The company now published an update on the attack, it confirmed that the root cause of the disruptions of its services was “the Ryuk virus malware attack.”

“This is an update to the status of Pitney Bowes recovery from the Ryuk virus malware attack on some of our systems that disrupted client access to some of our services.” reads the update shared by the company. “Upon discovery of the attack, w ith the sup port of third-party advisors, we immediately began working on a plan and thorough process of systems restoration with the goal of restoring service as quickly as possible. We have also been reaching out to our clients, partners, and employees.”

The mailing system products were paralyzed by the attack, the company confirmed that immediately after the attack the following systems were NOT working:

Clients are unable to refill postage or upload transactions on their mailing machine

SendPro Online in the UK and Canada

Online in the UK and Canada Hosted instances of SendSuite Live, SendSuite Express, SendSuite Tracking (SST)

Accounting solutions such as Inview, Business Manager and Account List Management

Your Account and the Pitney Bowes Supplies web store cannot be accessed. This in turn impacts clients subscribed to AutoInk and our Supplies App

The company announced that currently it has restored many of the impacted systems.

The Ryuk ransomware was involved in a long string of attacks targeting cities, hospitals, and organizations worldwide.

In September New Bedford city was infected with Ryuk ransomware, but did not pay $5.3M ransom. In April, systems at Stuart City were infected by the same Ryuk ransomware, in early March, Jackson County, Georgia, was hit by the same ransomware that paralyzed the government activity until officials decided to pay a $400,000 ransom to decrypt the files.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Ryuk Ransomware, Pitney Bowes)