Cognizant was hit by the Maze ransomware attack disrupting its operations

A multi billion-dollar IT services company ‘Cognizant’ as hit by the Maze ransomware attack on April 18th, Saturday. Cognizant is an IT giant and has clients across verticals like banking, oil and gas, pharmaceutical, restaurants, retail and more. Maze ransomware had already wrecked havoc across businesses in the US, and Cognizant had joined the list of Maze ransomware victims.

Cognizant has stated in their press release that their internal team and supplemented leading cyber defense firms are working to contain the attack, and they have also engaged with the appropriate law enforcement authorities. However, Maze ransomware attackers on other hand seems to actively compromise networks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also to be noted that, a UK based medical agency working on a vaccine for COVID-19, was hit by the Maze ransomware attack on the last week of March.

Cognizant has reported the incident to its clients, and have provided them with the Indicator of Compromise (IOCs) and other technical information of a defensive nature. On the contradictory to the attack, the Maze ransomware operators have denied their involvement in this incident on Cognizant, and have responded the same to Bleeping Computer.

If Cognizant was compromised by the Maze ransomware attack, then they should probably be in their network for weeks, as they initially breach the network, spread laterally among their systems, steal the data, encrypt them and finally request ransom for the encrypted data. However, if the data is already lost this is not just cyberattack but a data breach too. Cybercriminals aren’t slowing down, question is whether we have the right security strategies, to defend against a ransomware attack, a DDOS, or a sneaky phishing campaign.

Cyberattacks will intensify further

Considering the pandemic, and the work from home trend, network security for individual devices across geography should be high. Each endpoint has to be protected with the right firewall, patches, firmware updates, browser security and more. Considering even the critical IT resources are working from home, the risk of brute force attacks, spear phishing, and malicious attachments will continue to rise. 

IT manager and technicians should ensure they have deployed the right security configurations to their employee devices and the servers to stay immune against cyberattacks. 

We need to wait until Cognizant discloses, how the Maze ransomware sneaked into the network, but The Cybersecurity Times predicts it is mostly of a phishing scam that one of their employees became victim to. 

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