From The Desk Of Mark *********, CEO, ********* Corporation
To all of our valued clients:
On February 19th at approximately 3:00 pm Department of Homeland Security contacted me to inform me there was a person or persons on the dark web trying to sell “access” to the our client databases. As company President and Owner of *** I made the decision to immediately take the site down. In addition, the FBI is coming in tomorrow (Friday) at 9:30am to further the investigation. Under Title 18 they will work together with Homeland Security.
On February 18th a bad actor (DHS terminology) from the dark web gained access to our servers which controls our client databases. While they accessed the servers they did not specifically access users or administrators per the event logs. We know they did a count on the number of users and administrators in the various company databases.
Hence why we shut down the system from outside access. We are working on an incident report that will be made available to all clients when we have completed the process.
I would like to thank you for your patience. We are confident the breach has not been taken to an individual level.
We have engaged the world’s best Information recon company to mitigate any future exposures.
Mark *********
Yep, the company's client databases were being offered for sale on the dark web. Ouch. As a result, the company was forced to take these other actions:
From: ********* Rick <*****@*******>
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2020 4:13 PM
To: _All Associates <allassociates@*******>
Subject: FW: Notice: Payroll Check Stub Advice will be issue on paper tomorrow.
To all Associates:
The service we use to communicate ***** payroll information to you has been compromised. Information on what occurred is detailed below from *****’s CEO, Mark ********. The impact to us is that we will not be communicating our payroll information to ***** this week and we will be issuing paper check stub payroll advise to you in the old fashioned way. Your pay will be in your account as usual but the payroll information will come on a payroll check stub. We will monitor the situation below and advise you of any problems that develop.
We will issue physical payroll check stubs tomorrow, Friday, 2/21/2020 for all of the direct deposit payroll accounts instead of providing that information digitally over the internet or cell phone.
This has no impact on the dollars that have already been transferred to your direct deposit account.
We will keep you informed, as we are informed, of the status of this hack attack.
Thank you.
Rick *********
OUCH.
