Compal Electronics

The Taiwanese company of Compal founded in 1984 is engaged in contract manufacturing of notebooks, monitors, tablets and TVs for different clients worldwide. Among the large companies which cooperate with Compal: Apple, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu.

History

2020: Attack of a virus racketeer

At the beginning of November, 2020 Compal endured the attack of a virus racketeer. Hackers demanded $17 million the redemption from the largest contract producer of notebooks.

Judging by a screenshot to a note with the requirement of the redemption which the staff of Compal shared with Yahoo News the hacker attack was organized by the DoppelPaymer grouping. DoppelPaymer mainly specializes in attacks to corporate networks. For this purpose the malware gets access to the rights of the network administrator, and then uses them for further distribution on a system. According to the Taiwan media, the encoder mentioned about 30% of a computer network of Compal.

The largest contract producer of Compal Electronics notebooks attacked a virus racketeer

The staff of the company who arrived to work after the attack was met by the notification from the Compal IT command which appealed to them to check a status of workstations and to make backup copies of important files if a system did not suffer. IT specialists of Compal continue to be engaged in recovery of the ciphered data from backups.

Despite information published by local media to substitute heads of Compal Qingxiong Lu recognized that the company endured the attack, however began to deny that idle time in activity of the company was connected with effects of the attack of the encoder. Lu noted that failure affected only internal office network Compal, and production lines were not broken.

Earlier DoppelPaymer attacked the Mexican oil company Pemex and required the redemption in 100 bitcoins for decoding of files of the municipal websites and services of the city of Torrance.^[1]

Notes