Global Shipping Firm Pitney Bowes Affected by Ransomware Attack

Global shipping and mailing services company Pitney Bowes announced today that it was the victim of a ransomware attack that encrypted some of its systems, leading to a partial system outage that impacted customer access to some services.

Pitney Bowes is a global tech company that provides mailing, e-commerce, shipping, data, and financial services, and powering billions of transactions for more than 1.5 million clients around the world, including 90% of Fortune 500 companies according to a press release published today.

"At this time, the company has seen no evidence that customer or employee data has been improperly accessed," says Pitney Bowes' system update statement.

"Upon discovery of the cyberattack, we immediately assembled our Enterprise Outage Response Team to address the situation. We continue to work with third party security experts to resolve the issues."

Multiple Pitney Bowes services currently impacted

The ransomware attack impacted Pitney Bowes' mailing system products and blocked access to the Your Account service, with the following systems currently being down for clients with postage meters and SendPro products:

The statement also lists the systems that are currently working:

The company says that customers are safe to use their meter and SendPro products. "You will not be able to refill your postage meter until we resolve our systems outage, but if you have funds loaded you will be able to print postage."

For clients with Mail360 and MIPro Licensing products, the outage affects Your Account access, Data fulfillment, and some of our Support pages, with Software and Data Marketplace downloads being unavailable.

For Commerce Services clients, "cross border solutions, as well as all shipping technology, label generation and tracking solutions were not impacted," while Fulfillment, Delivery and Returns clients and Presort services were impacted.

"The Software and Data products themselves are not directly affected because they do not access the backend systems of the Pitney Bowes network. We have seen no evidence that customer accounts or data have been impacted," adds the company.

Pitney Bowes was affected by a malware attack which impacted some systems & disrupted client access to some of our services. We apologize for any disruption to your systems. We are working to restore affected systems. Please visit https://t.co/ixUa5FCGUQ for updates.

— Pitney Bowes (@PitneyBowes) October 14, 2019

This attack comes right after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) published during early October a public service announcement regarding the increasing number of high-impact ransomware attacks targeting both public and private U.S. organizations.

During late September, the U.S. Senate also passed the 'DHS Cyber Hunt and Incident Response Teams Act' (S.315) to authorize the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to maintain cyber hunt and incident response teams designed to help private and public entities fight against ransomware-based cyber-attacks.

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Update October 15, 08:00 EST: Pitney Bowes says that it has made progress in resolving postage meter refill functionality: