The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has taken its servers offline after it was victim to a cyberattack by the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang. The Dutch Research Council is the main funding research body for institutes in the Netherlands, with investments of around one billion euros per year. They announced in early February that their network had been hacked, revealing information about the impact it had on their activity, but no information on the actual incident.
It is now believed that the attack took place on the 8th of February when attackers gained access to NWO’s network and stole internal documents. The attackers then threatened to leak the documents unless a ransom was paid. However, as the NWO does not cooperate with cybercriminals, the stolen documents were published online.
