Share prices in Isentia, a large media and data company are down 30% after the company revealed potential $8.5 million costs to fix a ransomware attack that took over its media portal service.
The company today released a statement saying it expects the cleanup bill of a recent ransomware attack will cost more than $8.5 million to fix, after the company was targeted by hackers last week. Investors retreated as the ransomware costs were announced, with Isentia’s stock price down nearly 30% during trading today.
The ransomware attack took control of Isentia’s mediaportal system, which caused the company to enter a trading halt on the Australian Stock Exchange before confirming the million-dollar fix to the market today.
The company has told investors that the cyber incident was “significant,” considering that some of its core “operations were severely compromised.”
“Isentia advises that the immediate impact on the company’s net profit before tax (NPBT) from the cyber security incident is expected to be a significant decline in the range of $7 million to $8.5m in FY2021.”
News of the potential $8.5 million ransomware fix sent shares down nearly 30% toward the conclusion of trading today, falling from $0.18 Thursday last week down to $0.12 in trading on Tuesday, levelling out to $0.13 as of writing.
Isentia’s Managing Director and CEO, Ed Harrison has said that the “estimate of $7m-8.5m reflects remediation costs and forgone revenues from services affected by the outage.”
CEO Harrison said that Isentia “responded rapidly to the cyber attack last week putting in place measures to support our customers and contain the impact of our systems.”
“We are pleased to report that we are making good progress in resolving this issue, with key elements of our service being restored each day and I would like to thank our customers for their patience during this time,” Harrison concluded.
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Isentia says that it “cut off the unauthorised party’s entry point,” following the discovery of the data breach and subsequent ransomware attack, adding that they have observed “no evidence of further activity since the incident occurred on Monday 26th October.”
“As servers are brought back online we are ensuring they are free of any malicious software and have an additional level of monitoring enabled,” the company added. “Our security experts are forensically examining our services to ensure we have correctly identified the entry point, and also to determine if any data has been affected.”
Isentia added that the company “is monitoring for any evidence that clients data has been posted,” while stating that “at this time, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case, however this remains under close review and we will contact you as soon as possible if we confirm any of your information has been compromised.”
“Isentia has been able to progressively restore a number of services in recent days and this is ongoing,” adding that the company’s Mediaportal was “operational and accessible by customers.”
Last week, Isentia made a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange confirming that the company had been hit by a ransomware attack which crippled its widely-used media portal service. The company said it was “working closely with leading external cyber security specialists to assess the extent of the incident and the impact on its systems.”
Isentia has contracts with the Australian government, Singtel, AMP, Samsung, Seek and the Walt Disney Corporate, as well as “government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and leading academic institutions.”
