A leading Nascar team has become the latest organization to suffer a crippling ransomware attack, after being hit by the notorious TeslaCrypt variant.
The attack on Circle Sport-Leavine Family Racing (CSLFR) effectively rendered unusable all mission critical track data, as well as info on test facilities and personnel information.
To recreate the data – which enables the team to hone its cars’ performance – would apparently have taken nearly 1500 man-hours.
“Just knowing that we could lose everything that we had worked so hard to achieve was terrifying. The data that they were threatening to take from us was priceless, we couldn’t go one day without it greatly impacting the team’s future success,” said Dave Winston, Nascar Sprint Cup Series crew chief.
“This was a completely foreign experience for all of us, and we had no idea what to do. What we did know was that if we didn't get the files back, we would lose years’ worth of work valued at millions of dollars.”
After paying the ransomware authors in the end, the team sought the help of Malwarebytes to ensure the same thing didn’t happen again, and to remove any lingering signs of malware.
According to the firm these additional instances of TeslaCrypt were found on over 10,000 files – highlighting the need for a thorough clean-up and remediation process following such an attack.
Malwarebytes claimed earlier this month that the volume of ransomware in exploit kits has increased 44% over the past six months.
As if to highlight the size of the problem, security vendor Trend Micro recently claimed that it has blocked more than 100 million ransomware threats for its customers in the past six months alone.
In fact, the firm has even launched a dedicated ransomware practice to help customers deal with the issue – which has reached epidemic proportions.
The FBI recently claimed that ransomware cost US businesses and consumers $209 million in the first quarter alone.