In an update yesterday designed to reassure customers that its systems were now safe, the world’s largest container line said it would “engage closely with customers and partners to share lessons from this incident and ensure you can benefit from our learnings”.
In an attempt to reassure customers that the systems were secured, the worlds largest container line confirmed their priority was to “primarily focus on full recovery to return to our normal customer service levels as quickly as possible”
In reply to questions raised over Maersk had lost data through the virus attack, the company responded:
“While our operations and communications have been significantly affected by this virus attack, no data breach or data loss to third-parties is known to have occurred as of this date.
“It has been confirmed by the leading cyber-crime analysts and agencies that, while the virus spreads rapidly within a company’s network, the virus does not spread between networks or across the internet,” Maersk said.
Maersk denied a failure to update its systems as the reasoning of the system being hacked.
“This virus attack was a previously unseen type of malware, and updates and patches applied to both the Windows systems and our antivirus were not an effective protection in this particular case,” Maersk said.
“Once our service has returned to more normal conditions, we will conduct a full post-mortem. Thereafter, we will engage closely with customers and partners to share lessons from this incident and ensure you can benefit from our learnings.”
Maersk is planning to relaunch their mobile app to support the tracking of items.
Customers were warned to expect a delay however: “You have already received short-term rate sheets for July and we are working on sending you updated August rates within this week as per normal procedure. The online rate request form and short-term quotes for dry cargo via standard emails have been delayed, and will be available again Monday next week.”
For quotations on reefer cargo, customers were asked to please contact their local sales person.
Meanwhile, Maersk said invoices were “available on My.Maerskline.com under MyFinance and are being sent to customers with an EDI link. We are still working on restoring relevant local applications to send invoices to you by email with local variations, which is expected within Monday next week.”
It concluded: “We acknowledge that while overall progress is being made, you may still encounter delays in response time in some locations. We assure you that we are clearing the final parts of the backlog while working hard to support your new business.”
Credit: Llyod's Loading list.
