Although it is one of the world’s biggest consultancy firms, Accenture wasn’t spared from being targeted by ransonmware gang Lockbit. The firm has confirmed the incident and Accenture spokesperson Stacey Jones said in a statement, “We immediately contained the matter and isolated the affected servers. We fully restored our affected systems from back up. There was no impact on Accenture’s operations, or on our clients’ systems.”
LockBit has targeted thousands of organisations since being active in September 2019. They have claimed responsibility for the attack last Tuesday. According to cybercrime monitoring firm Cyble, August 12 was the ransom deadline and they demanded $50 million for 6 terabytes of data.
Paying of ransoms is strongly discouraged by cyber experts. One of the reasons is because ransom payers don’t necessarily get all their data back, and it is highly likely that what they do get back cannot be trusted.
Since most consulting firms sell technology and cybersecurity services to their clients, they need to be critical against security threats. If they can’t prevent breaches of their own operations then how can clients be assured that they can be trusted to offer quality service, especially in keeping sensitive information. Breaches can and do occur but they need to be vigilant in maintaining the highest cyber defenses.
