Security News > 2021 > February > Dutch Research Council (NWO) confirms ransomware attack, data leak
The recent cyberattack that forced the Dutch Research Council to take its servers offline and suspend grant allocation processes was caused by the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang.
Since NWO does not cooperate with cybercriminals, DoppelPaymer published proof of the stolen internal data on their leak site.
NWO is currently working on restoring the network, which indicates that systems have been encrypted, typical to most ransomware actors.
A FAQ from the organization informs that the cyberattack impacted network disks with data processed by NWO, the NWO-I office, the National Governing Body for Practice-oriented Research SIA, and the Netherlands Initiative for Education Research.
The UK Research and Innovation agency, which has the same mission as NWO, has also been hit by a ransomware attack in January that encrypted data and affected some of its services.
While NWO still has some work to do to restore services and operations, UKRI announced that it restored services provided by its UK Research Office based in Brussels.
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