Suspected Akira ransomware attack against Tietoevry disrupts Sweden

Numerous companies, universities, colleges, government agencies, and municipalities across Sweden have been impacted by outages after Finnish IT services and enterprise cloud hosting firm Tietoevry had one of its Sweden-based data centers compromised in a ransomware attack allegedly conducted by the Akira ransomware operation, BleepingComputer reports. Such an attack, which involved the encryption of Tietroevry's virtualization and management servers in Sweden, impacted not only the Filmstaden, the country's largest cinema chain, and discount retail chain Rusta, but also the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University, and Uppsala County among others through outages affecting the company's Primula payroll and human resources management system. Tietoevry was reported to have been attacked by Akira ransomware comes after Finland's National Cyber Security Center issued a warning regarding the ransomware group's ongoing attacks, which began to escalate late last year. "The incidents were particularly related to weakly secured Cisco VPN implementations or their unpatched vulnerabilities. Recovery is usually hard," said the Finnish NCSC.