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Cognizant reports the April ransomware attack to California

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Dissent

Lawrence Abrams reports:

On April 17th, Cognizant began emailing their clients to warn them that they were under attack by the Maze Ransomware so that they could disconnect themselves from Cognizant and protect themselves from possibly being affected.

This email also contained indicators of compromise that included IP addresses utilized by Maze and file hashes for the kepstl32.dll, memes.tmp, and maze.dll files. These IP addresses and files are known to be used in previous attacks by the Maze ransomware actors.

While Cognizant stated that it was an attack by Maze, the Maze operators told BleepingComputer at the time that they weren’t behind the attack.

Read more on BleepingComputer.

Somewhat intriguingly, Cognizant’s template notification submissions to the California Attorney General’s Office were designated as “Letter 1” and “Letter 4,” so there may have been other notification templates also needed to respond to this incident, although the law may not have required some notifications to the state.

Neither of the notification templates indicate how many people, total, may have had their personal information stolen by the threat actors.  Nor do the letters make any mention of the ransom demand and whether Cognizant paid any ransom. Based on their earlier disclosures and the fact that their name or data had never appeared on Maze’s website, there was speculation that they had paid ransom, but as Abrams reports, Maze operators had denied being responsible for this attack.  Whether you believe the threat actors is up to you.

Category: Business SectorMalwareU.S.

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