Sandhills Global experience disrupt to operations, caused by Conti ransomware attack

On Thursday 30^th of September 2021, Sandhills Global, a US-based trade publication and hosting company catering to the transportation, agriculture, aircraft, heavy machinery, and technology industries, was hit by a Conti Ransomware attack that caused Sandhills Global to shut down all their IT systems to prevent the spread of the ransomware attack.

“Sandhills Global is currently responding to a ransomware attack that impacted our operations.  Systems and operations have been temporarily shut down to protect data and information, and we have retained cybersecurity experts to assist us with the investigation, which is ongoing.” – Sandhills Global.

The incident was noticed by the public when the website for Sandhills Global and all their hosted publications went offline, and they couldn’t be reached via their phones. It was confirmed that their system was taken as whenever anyone attempted to access websites that are hosted by Sandhills Global, they would discover a Cloudflare Origin DNS error page, which is an indication that Cloudflare was unable to connect to Sandhills’ servers.

They have stated that during their investigation of the incident, they haven’t found any evidence that any customer information has been compromised.