Transportation Technology Provider ‘Rand McNally’ Hit by Ransomware

• ‘Rand McNally’ suffered a cyber-attack that took several of its systems offline.
• The attack has characteristics of a ransomware incident, although it wasn’t confirmed.
• The firm says no client data appears to have been compromised, accessed, or stolen by the hackers.

Transportation mapping, fleet management, and travel electronics hardware provider Rand McNally has received a blow from hackers, which has crippled its systems. Although the cyber-attack happened three days ago, the disruption persists, as the firm’s IT teams are still fighting to restore full operation.

In fact, the company hasn’t even been able to provide a recovery timeline yet, so the users of fleet management solutions and other parts of its systems cannot even estimate what downtime they’re called to handle right now.

What customers can do besides being patient is to chat with either the “fleet support” or the “consumer electronics support” agents via chat and attempt to alleviate any technical trouble they’re facing through auxiliary systems or third-party solutions. If you’re using TND 760/765, HD100, DC 200, DC 210, TNDs, OverDryves, Tablets, and Headsets of ‘Rand McNally’, you may seek help on the chat right on the main website. Phones lines are all down, so chat is the only option.

The firm has also made it clear that there is no indication that the hackers have managed to steal any client data. Also, the GPS devices’ functionality should remain unaffected by the cyber-attack, so navigation shouldn’t be a problem. Apart from the fleet management and the logbook systems that rely on the cloud infrastructure, what has been impacted is the shipping times of orders made through the company’s online store.

For the clients who absolutely need to continue logging routes, pen and paper seem to be the only solution now. Once the systems are restored, the manually logged times and routes may be uploaded onto the “DriverConnect ELD” platform again.

While 'Rand McNally' has admitted the security incident, they haven’t shared any specific details. Judging from the results of the event, this looks like a ransomware attack, so we can safely make this assumption. 'Rand McNally' has recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was just acquired by Teleo Capital Management, so this may complicate the ransom payment and extortion process for the actors.