UK police hampered by ransomware attack on Eurofins forensics lab

The UK Police have suspended all forensic work with forensics lab Eurofins after it became aware of a serious data breach and ransomware attack on the lab.

Forensics lab Eurofins is believed to currently provide over 50% of the outsourced forensic analysis for police forces in the UK, including DNA analysis from crime scenes, ballistics from siezed firearms, and toxicology analysis from murder victims. The police were forced to suspend all work with the lab and move its forensics work to alternative companies following a sophisticated cyber-attack on the lab.

Computer Business Review reports that Eurofins initially detected a data breach in its computer systems at the start of the month. A piece of previously unseen malware managed to get past the company's anti-malware measures and compromised the company's internal network security. The company was forced to take its systems offline to prevent loss of access to other data and minimise the breach, effectively suspending all work while they figure out the extent of the breach.

The type of malware used in this case was a piece of ransomware, which infects a computer and then encrypts the victim's data before requesting payment (often in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin) to unlock the data. Companies that don't perform regular backups will lose their files and may be crippled by ransomware attacks, and those that do perform backups could still face extensive costs in resetting computer systems and loss of recent work.

The initial fears of those involved were that the incredibly sensitive data on the systems pertaining to police investigations could have been accessed by an attacker, but this isn't usually the case with ransomware. Eurofins claims that its investigation has found "no evidence of any unauthorised theft or transfer of confidential client data," and managed to get its labs back up and running by June 17th.

Source: Silicon Republic, Computer Business Review