Evraz Steel shuts down Regina plant after continent-wide computer hack

Evraz Steel has shut down all of its computer systems across North America as it deals with a ransomware attack that hit the company sometime late Wednesday.

Evraz confirmed the attack Thursday afternoon.

As a result, workers at Regina’s Evraz Steel plant received three-day layoff notices. On Thursday, management told workers to turn off and unplug all of their computer systems.

Corey Liebrecht works at the plant and spoke with 980 CJME just before noon on Thursday, Liebrecht said there were a few workers sticking around the plant, but all systems were shut down.

“(Management) told us this is a ransom-malware problem that they’re dealing with, and it is right across their system in North America,” he said.

Phone calls to the company’s head office in Chicago did not get through to its operating system or any of the phone system’s extensions.

Patrick Waldron, an Evraz spokesperson, said their information technologies teams are working to restore the systems as quickly as possible. There also isn’t any indication of any breach of confidential, personal, customer or employee information.

Liebrecht said Thursday’s night shifts at the plant had been cancelled along with all shifts for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

“They were hinting even at, if this takes a long time, that they may be laying off pretty much the entire workforce until they can get this fixed because right now they’re crippled,” Liebrecht said. “They can’t do anything.”

Waldron confirmed temporary layoff notices would be issued.

In a statement on its website, United Steelworkers Local 5890 — which represents the workers at the Regina plant — said Thursday’s night shift received three-day layoff notices and others were to be distributed Friday.

“The company is hopeful this issue will be fixed by Monday,” the union said. “At this moment maintenance will not be impacted but otherwise this will impact all other departments.”

A layoff of three days — or even longer — would hit the workers in the wallet.

“Nobody’s going to get paid for those days,” Liebrecht said, “and if it obviously extends, well, it doesn’t look good.”

Liebrecht added he and his co-workers were “shocked” that the company they work for could be shut down by a ransomware attack.

“It’s not something you expect,” he said. “It’s not something that I ever would have expected and I’ve been out there for 32 years.

“It was kind of a shock (Thursday) morning and everybody’s just wondering, ‘How long is this going to take to get fixed and when are we going to get back to work and back to normal?’ We hope it’s nothing long.”

There isn’t a timeline for when the systems will be back up and running.