[Resolved][Severity: Critical][Ransomware]

Honda: a cyberattack took down internal systems and stopped production at overseas plants, including in the US

Internal servers went down on June 8, and plants such as the one in Ohio stopped for several days. Security researchers suspected the Ekans ransomware; Honda gave no details.

Disclosed

2020-06-09

Organizations involved

Leaked or at risk

Unknown

Downtime

Unknown

What happened

2020-06-08 09:00
Honda found that its internal servers had gone down. [1]
2020-06-09
Some staff were encouraged to take paid leave and kept off the internal servers. Production stopped at some overseas sites, including in the US, while checks went on; Honda said production in Japan and China was not affected. [1] [2]
2020-06-09
A US security firm said the Ekans ransomware, which targets industrial control systems, may have been used. [3]
2020-06-10
Honda told reporters it regarded the cause as a cyberattack. Office systems and plants in Japan were back, and staff returned to normal work. Plants in Ohio and the motorcycle plants in India and Brazil were still stopped. Honda would not say whether ransomware was involved. [2]
2020-06-12
Honda said all nine plants that had stopped around the world were running again; Brazil returned on June 10 local time and Ohio by June 11. [4]

Impact

Production stopped for a while at 9 plants worldwide because of the outage and the checks that followed. Honda said the effect on production and sales was minimal and would barely touch its results. [2] [4]

In the US, Honda's customer service and financial services were also unavailable. [3]