Cognizant Expects To Lose Between $50 Million and $70 Million Following Ransomware Attack

IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. ZDNet reports: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services.

Speaking on the ransomware attack, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said the incident only impacted its internal network, but not customer systems. More precisely, Humphries said the ransomware incident impacted (1) Cognizant's select system supporting employees' work from home setups and (2) the provisioning of laptops that Cognizant was using to support its work from home capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humphries said staff moved quickly to take down all impacted systems, which impacted Cognizant's billing system for a period of time. Some customer services were taken down as a precaution.

Paying the ransom should be a crime.

[LenKagetsu]

If I funded a drug dealer, car thief, or any other criminal I would be convicted. It's only fair that anyone who pays the ransom should be fined or even jailed for it, as it only encourages them.

That and it's their fault for not keeping backups of their data. It's not difficult or expensive to do so.

Re:Paying the ransom should be a crime.

[lessSockMorePuppet]

This dupe is still on the front page.

Nice going.

Re:

[NoMoreACs]

If I funded a drug dealer, car thief, or any other criminal I would be convicted. It's only fair that anyone who pays the ransom should be fined or even jailed for it, as it only encourages them.

That and it's their fault for not keeping backups of their data. It's not difficult or expensive to do so.

So, Mr. Smartypants Communist, what do you do when the backups themselves are either infected or encrypted by the Ransomware (as is often the case)?

Who's fault is it then, fuckface?

Re:

[lessSockMorePuppet]

Who's fault is it then, fuckface?

It's John's fault, over in IT of course. ;)

The person who pushed backups rather than pulled

[raymorris]

Backups get hit when they are PUSHED from the main machine to the backup server, often combined with the "backup" being on a public, world-writeable file share. Such that anything that goes wrong is likely to wipe out the backup, as well as the backup exposing all of your sensitive, otherwise access-controlled data to everyone. In other words, when the enterprise backup is designed by someone not quite qualified to back up their own home computer.

We've known for a long, long time that arrangement is wrong.

Re:

[cusco]

Backups get hit when they are PUSHED

What??? People actually do that??? Admittedly I haven't had doing backups as a primary duty for 15 years, but it's hard for me to conceive of a reason to do it that way.

See your sig

[raymorris]

Please refer to your own signature line. :)

Re:

[sysrammer]

Please refer to your own signature line. :)

Oh em gee and all that. I'm trying to think of any site that I've seen that pushed backups. No joy, every pro (and amateur) system that I've seen pulls, as is appropriate. Even tar cvf :)

Re:

[LenKagetsu]

Yours for not airgapping the backups.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

TFA doesn't explicitly say whether Cognizant paid or not, but implies that they did not.

Re:

[alvinrod]

That just encourages people to keep quiet about everything while still paying the ransom. They'll just write it off as some huge consultancy fee to fix some big IT problem without going into much detail. Weird how this is starting to sound like Oracle, but I digress.

The real solution is to take all the drones we have in the Middle East (I mean do we really need to bomb any more weddings?) and use those against the spammers and ransomware peddlers. I don't think there's any political side that would get u

Re:

[LenKagetsu]

Someone who is so left he's left the realm of common sense would bawl about how they're "only trying to feed their families".

Same Page Dupe

[WoodstockJeff]

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

Re:

[notdecnet]

Is anyone at slashdot even reading their own front page?

Always the same question

[turbidostato]

Is this a ransomware attack at IT systems or is it a ransomware attack at Microsoft Windows systems?

Others have talked about how roles overseeing the backup processes should be held liable (still no difference between pulling or pushing backups if the data moved one way or the other is already compromised) but then, the single high-level culprit (for virus, worms, ransomware, spyware...) seems to always be oversighted: Microsoft products.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Microsoft Windows strikes again ..

[notdecnet]

“Maze is a particularly sophisticated strain of Windows ransomware [tripwire.com] [tripwire.com] that has hit companies and organizations around the world and demanded that a cryptocurrency payment be made in exchange for the safe recovery of encrypted data.”