Ransomware attack causes outages at 60 credit unions, federal agency says

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — About 60 credit unions in the US are experiencing outages because of a ransomware attack on an IT provider the credit unions use, a federal agency said Friday.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the agency that insures deposits at federally insured credit unions, said in a statement to CNN that it was “coordinating with affected credit unions” in the wake of the hack.

The full extent of the outage and its impact on credit unions was unclear Friday evening. One of the affected credit unions, New York-based Mountain Valley Federal Credit Union, said that technicians from the hacked IT provider were “working around the clock to get our systems” back online.

Credit unions reported that the ransomware attack — in which cybercriminals typically lock computer system as an extortion tactic — affected a unit of Trellance, a cloud computing firm provider used by credit unions, NCUA spokesperson Joseph Adamoli said in a statement to CNN.

The affected Trellance-owned company, Ongoing Operations, said in a statement on Saturday that the cybersecurity incident was “isolated to a segment” of its network. “We will notify impacted individuals once we confirm the scope of the incident.”

The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, reported earlier on the ransomware attack.

The incident is just the latest example of how ransomware attacks have caused havoc for US critical infrastructure in recent years. Hospitals, fuel pipelines and schools have also been disrupted by the file-locking cyberattacks, prompting the Biden administration to treat ransomware as a national security crisis.

This story has been updated with additional comment.

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