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Scattered Spider Social Engineering Attack on Clorox via Cognizant Service Desk

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📰 1 unique sources, 1 articles

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In August 2023, the Scattered Spider group exploited human fallibility to hack Clorox by repeatedly calling the service desk run by Cognizant. The attackers impersonated locked-out employees and requested password and MFA resets without proper verification. This led to domain-admin access and significant financial damage, including $380 million in losses due to operational paralysis and data loss. The attack highlights the risks of weak verification processes in outsourced service desks. The attackers successfully obtained repeated resets by mimicking legitimate user behavior and pressuring service desk agents to skip security protocols. The impact included production system outages, manufacturing pauses, manual order processing, and shipment delays, resulting in substantial business-interruption losses and remedial costs. The incident underscores the importance of robust caller verification and enforcement of security protocols in third-party service desks to prevent similar attacks.

Timeline

  1. 10.09.2025 17:02 📰 1 articles · ⏱ 6d ago

    Scattered Spider Social Engineering Attack on Clorox via Cognizant Service Desk

    In August 2023, Scattered Spider exploited human fallibility to hack Clorox by repeatedly calling the service desk run by Cognizant. The attackers impersonated locked-out employees and requested password and MFA resets without proper verification. This led to domain-admin access and significant financial damage, including $380 million in losses due to operational paralysis and data loss. The attackers successfully obtained repeated resets by mimicking legitimate user behavior and pressuring service desk agents to skip security protocols. The impact included production system outages, manufacturing pauses, manual order processing, and shipment delays, resulting in substantial business-interruption losses and remedial costs.

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