Accenture recently filed documents showing that a ransomware attack it suffered months ago led to a data breach. The organization had initially claimed that the ransomware attack had "no impact" on its business.
Accenture stated in its fourth quarter and full fiscal year financial report that the ransomware group responsible for the attack stole company data. The organization experienced "data security incidents resulting from unauthorized access to our and our service providers' systems and unauthorized acquisition of our data and our clients' data including: inadvertent disclosure, misconfiguration of systems, phishing ransomware or malware attacks."
According to the report, Accenture first detected "irregular activity," including "extraction of proprietary information by a third party," in its systems during the fourth quarter of FY 2021. The third party allegedly made some of the data it stole available to the public.
Accenture admitted that some of its customers' sensitive information was compromised. The report stated that clients had experienced "breaches of systems and cloud-based services enabled by or provided by us."
It is believed that the LockBit group carried out the ransomware attack. In August 2021, the ransomware group threatened on its website to leak data stolen from Accenture. LockBit demanded a $50 million ransom in exchange for six terabytes of stolen data.
When it first shared news of the ransomware attack, Accenture maintained that LockBit's claims were false. According to BleepingComputer, Accenture has not yet publicly acknowledged the data breach outside of SEC filings and data breach notification letters filed with the authorities. Lyle Adriano "Accenture confirms ransomware incident also involved data breach" www.insurancebusinessmag.com (Oct. 19, 2021).