Cleansing merchandise large Clorox has filed a lawsuit in opposition to IT providers supplier Cognizant, accusing the corporate of creating it simple for hackers to breach its methods within the 2023 cyberattack.
Clorox is looking for $380 million from Cognizant, which incorporates $49 million in remedial prices — this quantity was beforehand reported by Clorox — and lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} in losses brought on by enterprise interruption.
The cybersecurity incident got here to gentle in August 2023, when Clorox reported shutting down some methods in response to a hacker assault. The corporate later stated the damaging cyberattack induced important disruptions to its operations, which led to product shortages.
Whereas it has not been confirmed, the assault was linked on the time to the infamous Scattered Spider cybercrime group, which has just lately been as soon as once more extremely energetic. A number of alleged members of the gang have been arrested and prosecuted over the previous yr.
Within the grievance in opposition to Cognizant (courtesy of Darkish Net Informer), Clorox stated the corporate had supplied assist providers, together with for recovering and resetting passwords.
Clorox stated Cognizant staff didn’t comply with established procedures and didn’t authenticate the people requesting password restoration or reset help.
The cleansing merchandise agency has shared a number of the conversations between the hackers and Cognizant workers, and so they apparently present that the cybercriminals have been certainly simply handed over the credentials they requested.
Clorox stated Congizant staff — over a number of calls — reset passwords related to Okta entry, and helped the attackers reset multi-factor authentication (each Okta and Microsoft MFA), with out verifying the alleged caller’s identification. Commercial. Scroll to proceed studying.
“Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or subtle hacking strategies. The cybercriminal simply referred to as the Cognizant Service Desk, requested for credentials to entry Clorox’s community, and Cognizant handed the credentials proper over,” Clorox alleges within the lawsuit.
Whereas Clorox claims that Cognizant had been tasked with serving to “guard the proverbial entrance door”, the IT providers supplier stated in a press release to the media that it had not been in control of Clorox’s cybersecurity.
“It’s stunning {that a} company the dimensions of Clorox had such a clumsy inner cybersecurity system to mitigate this assault,” Cognizant stated. “Clorox has tried responsible us for these failures, however the actuality is that Clorox employed Cognizant for a slender scope of assist desk providers which Cognizant moderately carried out. Cognizant didn’t handle cybersecurity for Clorox.”
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