Shareholders and employee representatives are demanding more information from the Executive Board on the cyber attack on Continental.
(Photo: imago images/Joachim Sielski)
Dusseldorf In the course of the cyber attack on Continental, the pressure on the board of the automotive supplier is increasing. According to information from the Handelsblatt, the supervisory board will hold a special meeting on Tuesday evening to find out about the current status of the investigation.
According to the head of the supervisory board, Wolfgang Reitzle, employee representatives and shareholders had previously pushed for the special meeting of the supervisory body. The largest shareholder at Continental is Georg Schaeffler’s Schaeffler Holding.
Continental confirmed information from the Handelsblatt last week that the ransomware group “Lockbit 3.0” stole a significant amount of company data in August – possibly including sensitive data from employees and business partners such as Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes.
According to corporate circles, it is a total of 40 terabytes. It is the first time that such a massive data theft has become known at a Dax group. Most companies have warning systems in place for a data leak of this magnitude.
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In industry circles, however, it is not surprising that the hackers were able to steal such a large data set from Continental unnoticed. On average, more than 200 terabytes of data are sent between the various servers of the automotive supplier every day. If 40 terabytes are tapped over a longer period of time, there is a risk that this will not be noticed.
No files released yet
According to Handelsblatt information, employee representatives had already written to the group board and the chairman of the supervisory board last Tuesday. In it, they called for better clarification about the cyber incident at Continental and an assessment of what consequences the hacker attack could have for the company and employees.
Continental itself made the cyber attack public in August. At that time, however, it was still said that the company had averted the attack. It was not until the beginning of November that it became known that data was actually leaked, how many and which files actually fell into the hands of the cybercriminals.
The Lockbit group initially published a log of a chat with a Conti negotiator on its blog on the dark web. The hackers then also put the list of captured files online. Since then, Continental has kept a low profile internally and externally and has hardly shared any information beyond the status of August.
Lockbit has not yet published the data itself – although an ultimatum expired days ago. Continental emphasizes that the group did not pay any ransom. It is unclear whether third parties were willing to pay the price of 50 million US dollars the hackers asked for the data set.
More: After cyber attack on Continental: hackers publish list of captured data