MKS Instruments Faces Revenue Hit from Ransomware Attack

MKS Instruments, a global provider of systems for advanced manufacturing processes, is anticipating a 20% hit to quarterly revenue due to disruptions to its supply chain operations from a ransomware attack that occurred in February, CybersecurityDive reports.

The attack prevented the company from meeting the demand for its semiconductor manufacturing and advanced electronics and may have also impacted its photonics and vacuum divisions, President and CEO John Lee said on the company’s quarterly earnings call.

“We are well into the recovery phase of our manufacturing and service operations following the ransomware incident identified on February 3rd, and we expect these operations will be restored over the coming weeks,” Lee said.

Takeaway:

The bottom line is that ransomware attacks net proceeds in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars - this is big business with a relatively low barrier to entry given the availability of RaaS (Ransomware as a Service) platforms. The ransomware attack on MKS prevented the company from meeting customer demand for its products across multiple divisions. This illustrates how ransomware attacks can cost victim organizations hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, significantly impacting their balance sheets.

Attackers are unlikely to shift away from ransomware until we can remove the economic incentives for the attackers, and that will come only through enhancing prevention and resiliency capabilities. To better protect themselves, organizations must ensure they have not only robust detection capabilities but also ensure they are positioned to be resilient if/when a ransomware attack is successful. They need confidence that they can respond and remediate ransomware swiftly and minimize any potential business disruptions.

If we can raise the cost to the attackers and eliminate the need for organizations to pay a ransom demand to recover their systems, we can eliminate the economic incentives driving these disruptive attacks. Organizations of every size need to implement a robust prevention and resilience strategy to defend against ransomware attacks. We recommend incorporating patch management, data backups, access controls, employee awareness training, endpoint protection solutions, incident response and organizational resilience testing into all ransom readiness plans.

Halcyon.ai is the industry’s first dedicated, adaptive security platform that combines multiple advanced proprietary prevention engines along with AI models focused specifically on stopping ransomware – talk to a Halcyon expert today to find out more.