Medusa Group (allegedly) attacks Farmatodo, leaving the chain without electronic payment options
On June 27, 2024, the pharmacy and retail chain Farmatodo suffered a cyberattack that paralyzed its electronic payment systems nationwide—including integrated point-of-sale, mobile payment, self-checkout, and delivery payment—forcing the company to operate on cash only for several hours. Security experts attributed the incident to the Medusa group, the same actor linked to previous attacks against Digitel and Banco de Venezuela, which publicly mocked Farmatodo on X with the message “Farmatodo, is everything okay?” The company did not issue an official statement regarding the cause of the incident.
Overview
Missing evidence
Impact details
Public sources report that Farmatodo lost connectivity at point-of-sale terminals, mobile payment systems, delivery services, self-checkout kiosks, and prepaid top-up services during the incident on June 27, 2024. Attribution to Medusa/ransomware appears in secondary reports, but there is no official confirmation or public evidence of data exfiltration.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- Service outage
- Confidence
- Medium
Public documents report an interruption in payment/electronic services; the attribution to Medusa is secondary and unconfirmed.
Severity assessment
Medium- Functional impact
- Degraded (non-critical)
- Information impact
- None
- Affected scope
- Organization-wide
- Critical service
- None
- Public confidence
- Moderate
- Recoverability
- Supplemented
Payment channels were unavailable for several hours; Farmatodo confirmed that there was no data breach or ransomware attack.
Timeline
Nationwide failure and outage of Farmatodo’s electronic payment systems; stores switch to operating on a cash-only basis.
Accounts linked to the Medusa group mock Farmatodo on X with the message “Farmatodo, is everything okay?”, in line with their previous attacks on Digitel and Banco de Venezuela.
Venezuelan media report the incident; hours later, card payments are partially restored through external point-of-sale terminals.