[ad_1]
Library lending app Onleihe announced problems lending various media formats offered on the platform, such as audio files, video files, and e-books, after a targeted cyberattack on its provider.
Onleihe is an app that allows users to connect to their local libraries and borrow e-books, e-zines, and audiobooks. The app is used by numerous universities in Europe and also by the international Goethe-Institut, and in Germany it accounts for about 40% of all e-book consumption.
According to the announcement, there was a bug in the system last week, deleting files that were encrypted with copy protection.
These files will need to be re-encrypted and uploaded to the library to become available again, which is currently an ongoing process.
Video and audio files have been affected to the point of showing streaming errors, while e-book files affected by the incident only show the first chapter or samples of random content.
Onleihe has provided a list of titles reported to be affected and advises users to remove them from their devices and download them again.
Finally, the platform’s user forums are currently unavailable due to a technical issue of an undefined nature.
Attack on a service provider
Onleihe’s service provider EKZ suffered a cyber attack on April 18, 2022, which made specific systems inaccessible.
This outage affected the websites ekz.de, ekz.at, ekz.fr, divibib.com, the divibib user forum, the divibib Pentaho statistics page and catalog data, and ID-Delivery.
“Divibib online lending subsidiaries’ library user-related systems (with the exception of eAudios and eVideos) and LMSCloud, as well as our email applications, are not affected.” affirmed the announcement of EKZ.
The company filed criminal charges with local law enforcement and hired outside specialists to help with the restore while its IT team evaluated available backups.
Yesterday, EKZ updated the situation, stating that most of the systems have been restored. However, invoicing and order processing are still affected by delays as the store team is still offline.
LockBit 2.0 claims responsibility.
While the word ransomware is not mentioned in EKZ’s announcement, Bleeping Computer was able to find the company listed on the LockBit ransomware leak site.
When ransomware gangs breach corporate networks, they spend some time stealing data to use in double-extortion attacks. If a victim does not pay the ransom, this data is leaked on the ransomware gang’s Tor data leak site.
On April 28, the LockBit gang released data allegedly stolen from EKZ, as shown below.
Since LockBit has released 100% of the data, this indicates that EKZ will not pay the ransom and it will likely be restored from backups.
[ad_2]
