Accounting and consultancy giant Accenture has become the latest major victim of a ransomware attack. After Accenture initially reported that it had repelled a hacker group named Lockbit, encrypted files belonging to Accenture began to be published today, according to a report by Decrypt.
Fast facts
- An Accenture spokesperson said in a statement: “Through our security controls and protocols, we identified irregular activity in one of our environments … We immediately contained the matter and isolated the affected servers. We fully restored our affected systems from backup. There was no impact on Accenture’s operations, or on our clients’ systems.”
- Despite the company’s assurances, Lockbit has published at least 2,384 files so far, as screenshots of LockBit’s Dark Web page reveal.
- Accenture has more than half a million employees across multiple countries and brought in revenue of more than US$40 billion last year. It is involved in numerous blockchain and central bank digital currency initiatives, including Project Jura, a cross-border wholesale CBDC project run by the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub and the central banks of France and Switzerland.
- It is also a foundational partner of the Digital Dollar Project, which encourages research and public discourse on digital currencies and lobbies governments on behalf of the industry. Speaking to Forkast.News about the project, David Treat, a senior managing director at Accenture, said: “[Regarding the digital dollar and] cross-border money movement, there’s a huge rationale for being able to send money as easily as you and I could text a picture to each other. To be able to use a tokenized version of fiat currency and to move value around is enormously important.”
- Bitcoin has often been the currency of choice for large-scale ransomware attacks, such as the Colonial Pipeline attack in May. Although prosecutors were eventually able to recover most of those funds, the episode fueled concerns among regulators over the use of crypto in such cases.