It took almost five days, but the Rand McNally electronic logging device (ELD) system is largely back online.
The company announced midday Monday that soon after midnight, the DriverConnect platform “became available and operational for drivers.”
“As a result, drivers using the ELD systems are compliant, able to view, edit, and certify logs as well as provide them in the event of a roadside inspection,” the company said in a prepared statement.
Rand McNally announced last Wednesday that its ELD service had gone offline as a result of a “cyber incident.” The company still is not specifying what the incident was, but an outage of five days is consistent with the impact from a serious malware or ransomware attack.
The incident also affected the company’s phone system. “The Chicago and Richmond, KY phone system is up and running, as is the Customer Support network,” the statement said. “We continue to provide added additional support staff who are reachable via phone or Support Chat.”
As of the time of Rand McNally’s prepared statement Monday, its ELD system was not entirely back online. DriverConnect’s ability to produce reports and “other back office features” would be returning to operation “soon,” the company said.
Rand McNally reiterated that its GPS device systems were not impacted by the cyber incident.
“We have taken significant steps forward toward restoration and continue to investigate for more insight into the incident and how to prevent future disruption,” the statement said.
While Rand McNally said it had kept the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration up to date on its problems, the company was not required to make the public disclosure about its problems. Many companies hit with a cyberattack notify their customers — it’s kind of hard not to when the system goes down — but notification to the media is usually not part of the response. In that sense, what Rand McNally did stood out as atypical.
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