Hackers love weekends and holidays, when cybersecurity teams are in reduced training.
The sales site of Damart, the distributor of winter clothing including the famous sweaters, has been displaying a message of unavailability for several days for its French and British customers.
The cause ?
A cyberattack occurred on Monday August 15 which affected the servers of the company based in Roubaix (North).
“The intrusion was quickly detected by our teams, the attackers did not have time to do what they wanted such as fully deploying ransomware and there was, at this stage, no evidence of a theft of our customers' data, ”says a spokesperson for the group.
The hackers did not leave their business card but the latest strain of Hive ransomware was found in the computer system.
Read alsoCyberattacks: how hackers can put a hospital out of order
In the haste of their discovery, the hackers nevertheless launched the partial encryption, that is to say the computer paralysis, of the technical servers.
These cybercriminals have mainly succeeded in reaching the Active Directory, the critical service used to administer a computer network and manage accounts and identifiers.
Damart's commercial site displays a message that mentions a computer security problem.
This is why Damart's sales network and its 92 stores are operating in degraded mode.
Sellers do not, for example, have access to stock status or current orders.
A return to normal is not expected for several weeks and the company intends to relaunch internal services as a priority, such as payroll or supplier settlement.
A specialized service provider is already on site to thoroughly clean the computer systems and restart the servers, ensuring the absence of the Hive malware.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: how Vladimir Putin built up an army of unlimited hackers
No ransom note was discovered after the attackers passed through, according to Damart.
A complaint was filed with the specialized services of the Gendarmerie and the Cnil was notified, as required by the procedure in the event of a computer attack involving personal and commercial data.
The Hive ransomware had already hit the towns of Seine-Saint-Denis last December by also demanding, without success, the payment of a ransom.