Data center giant Equinix discloses ransomware incident

Equinix, one of the world’s largest providers of on-demand colocation data centers, has disclosed today a security breach.

In a short statement published on its website, Equinix said it found ransomware on its internal systems, but that the main core of its customer-facing services remained unaffected.

“Our data centers and our service offerings, including managed services, remain fully operational, and the incident has not affected our ability to support our customers,” the company said.

There is no suggestion that the company is downplaying the incident, with no major outages being reported at the time of writing, and no wave of customer complaints flooding social media.

“Note that as most customers operate their own equipment within Equinix data centers, this incident has had no impact on their operations or the data on their equipment at Equinix,” the company added.

Details about the ins and outs of the attack are not available, with Equinix citing an ongoing investigation.

Equinix is just the latest in a long list of ransomware incidents that have impacted web hosting and data center providers. The list also includes CyrusOne, Cognizant, A2 Hosting, SmarterASP.NET, Dataresolution.net, and Internet Nayana.

Such companies are ripe targets for cyber-criminals, and especially for ransomware gangs. The reasons are simple and involve the immediate effect of their attacks, which often bring down services for impacted companies, but also for their respective customers, all of whom are expecting near-perfect uptime.

This usually puts the pressure on the data center or web hosting provider to restore services right away, which may sometime include paying huge ransom demands.

Equinix is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange as EQIX and had around 8,000 employees. Earlier this year, Equinix entered into an agreement to purchase a portfolio of 13 data center sites, representing 25 data centers across Canada from BCE Inc. for approximately $750 million.

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