Maersk Had To Reinstall 45,000 PCs And 4,000 Servers After Suffering NotPetya's Attack

Shipping giant Maersk has announced that they had to reinstall about 45,000 PCs, 4,000 servers and 2,500 applications after suffering from the NotPetya attack.

Maersk was one of the companies that suffered from the NotPetya attack that struck Ukraine last year in August. The company's activities were almost crippled as they were forced to temporarily shutdown critical systems infected with the ransomware.

Due to cancellations and delays during that period, a record of about $300 was lost in revenue.

Also read: Ukrainian postal service suffers 48-hour DDoS attack

Maersk chairman, Jim Hageman Snabe shared details on the attack suffered by the company during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"The impact of (NotPetya) is that we basically found that we had to re install an entire infrastructure," Snabe said. "We had to install 4,000 new servers, 45,000 new PCs, 2,500 applications.

"And that was done in a heroic effort over ten days. Normally - I come from the IT industry - I would say it's gonna take six months. It took to days."

Maersk ship docks worldwide every 15 minutes, unloading about 20,000 containers. Imagine what it would be like running such a company without no IT for 10 days.

"It's almost impossible to even imagine. And we actually overcome that problem with human resilience," Snabe said. "We had a 20 percent drop in volume, so we managed 80 percent of that volume manually ... Customers were great contributors to overcoming that."

The Maersk chair pointed out that Maersk was a victim of a state sponsored attack aimed at Ukraine government. However, he described the incident as a "very significant wake-up call" to improve in terms of cyber-security.

The Snabe also made some point on the need for collaboration between companies and law enforcement.