On March 19 2019 Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers revealed that ransomware had been used in an attack against them. The Norwegian firm was attacked on March 18 and production processes at a number of facilities in Norway, Qatar, Brazil and other countries were affected.

Security researchers have found a way to corrupt the firmware of a critical component usually found in servers to turn the systems into an unbootable hardware assembly. The recovery procedure requires physical intervention to replace the malicious firmware.