Indian IT outsourcing giant Wipro has been breached and has been used as a launching point for multiple customer attacks according to the reports.
The company said it had hired a forensic firm to investigate the cyber attack on its systems. The company could be liable for damages if client information is found to be compromised, Wipro previously said in regulatory filings.
Cybersecurity investigation website KrebsOnSecurity reported that hackers had compromised Wipro’s IT systems and launched attacks on the firm’s clients.
Refuting the website’s claim that Wipro was in the process of building a “new private email network” because the intruders were believed to have compromised its corporate email system, chief executive Abidali Neemuchwala told reporters that “such attacks are common in the industry” and that the KrebsOnSecurity blog had conflated various events.
Commenting on the attack email expert Mark Bower, GM of Egress Software, said: “The Wipro hack and subsequent compromise of their IT systems is a demonstration of how devastating third-party, supply chain partner attacks can be. Early reports indicate that the hackers were already able to launch direct attacks on customer environments. Most concerning for the tens of thousands of Wipro customers – including many in the Fortune 500 – are the reports that Wipro’s email system has been compromised for some time.”
Wipro should immediately let customers know whether they were using message encryption internally to protect customer emails. Encrypting email messages at rest prevents the hackers from accessing sensitive data that can be weaponised to launch attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks.
He added that every Wipro customer should be hyper-aware of the potential of such attacks coming from this previously trusted domain. Employees should be on red alert for any email from this domain until Wipro demonstrates that its email system is rearchitected. Phishing attacks are used time and again because of how effective they are in taking advantage of human weakness. Their effectiveness is amplified exponentially when the phishing attacks come from what is believed to be a trusted partner.
Proactive companies can stay ahead of such attacks through continual employee education on what to look for and by making sure they have technology in place to mitigate people’s mistakes – like clicking a bad link – wherever possible.
