Hutchison’s Wind Tre Unit Reports Suspected Cyber Incident

(Bloomberg) -- CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd.’s Italian unit Wind Tre SpA, the country’s third largest phone company, reported a suspected security threat in some of its workstations, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg.

“All of you have read about large-scale threats to informatics systems involving more than 250,000 companies and public organizations all over the world,” Wind Tre Chief Executive Officer Jeff Hedberg wrote in a emailed message to the workforce on Friday. “In this context, about 40 computers of our company have experienced disruption, inefficiencies and consequently some documents stored in the company’s file sharing system aren’t available at the moment.”

The number of Wind Tre’s workstations allegedly affected are equal to 0.6% of the company’s total, the document said. Wind Tre already started work to restore normal activities, it shows.

“We have ringfenced some systems to prevent any impact on customer’ service, which we continue to provide without any interruption,” a spokesman for Wind Tre said.

Cyberattacks against companies have increased during the pandemic, with hackers targeting workers logging on from laptops at home and overwhelmed IT departments. Microsoft Corp. disclosed a vulnerability earlier this month. The software company said at the time that it believed Chinese state-backed hackers had found a weakness in the Microsoft Exchange Server software, allowing them to break into email accounts and install malware.

“If this would be confirmed as cyber attack, the general recommendation is to always apply the latest security updates and patches or at least deploy detection rules for known exploits, because recently there has been an increased exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities,” Federico Maggi, senior researcher at Trend Micro, said in a phone interview.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.