Australian gold mining company Evolution Mining announces ransomware attack

Evolution Mining, an Australian gold mining company, told investors on Monday that it became aware of a ransomware attack last week impacting its IT systems.

The company, which operates in Australia and Canada, filed a statement with the Australian Stock Exchange announcing that it had discovered the incident August 8, and that it now believes the attack to be “contained.”

Evolution Mining said it worked with “external cyber forensics experts to investigate the incident” but did not provide further details on which ransomware scheme was behind the attack, nor whether the company made an extortion payment.

“The incident has been proactively managed with a focus on protecting the health, safety and privacy of people, together with the company’s systems and data,” said the official notice, adding the company did “not anticipate any material impact on operations.”

The company, which recorded an underlying profit after income tax of over AUS $158 million (U.S. $104 million) in 2023, said it reported the attack to the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).

It comes as the Australian government considers introducing a new Cyber Security Act that would legally oblige businesses to report being hit by a ransomware attack to the ACSC, although debates are ongoing about whether the obligation will apply to smaller enterprises.

The legislative moves follows a series of high-profile ransomware attacks in Australia, particularly those affecting Optus, Medibank, and MediSecure.

As part of the Medibank criminals’ extortion attempt, sensitive healthcare claims data for around 480,000 individuals — including information about drug addiction treatments and abortions — was published on the dark web.

The move, alongside several other high-profile breaches, set off a range of cybersecurity reforms in Australia. These included an updated national cybersecurity strategy that ultimately fell short of the government’s initial intentions to ban ransomware payments in their entirety.