Clorox Struggling to Recover From August Cyber-Attack

A leading US manufacturer of cleaning products has admitted its operations are still experiencing major disruption after the firm experienced a cyber-attack a month ago.

Clorox announced the attack on August 14, revealing it had observed unauthorized activity on some IT systems which had to subsequently be taken offline while it remediated the incident.

However, although the company stated in an SEC filing yesterday that it “believes the unauthorized activity is contained,” it warned of a significant impact to the business, as it was forced to revert to manual ordering and processing.

“The company is operating at a lower rate of order processing and has recently begun to experience an elevated level of consumer product availability issues,” it admitted.

Clorox added that the attack had damaged portions of its IT infrastructure and caused “widescale disruption” to its operations.

“The company is repairing the infrastructure and is reintegrating the systems that were proactively taken offline. The company expects to begin the process of transitioning back to normal automated order processing the week of September 25,” the filing continued.

“Clorox has already resumed production at the vast majority of its manufacturing sites and expects the ramp up to full production to occur over time. At this time, the company cannot estimate how long it will take to resume fully normalized operations.”

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Clorox is still working out the financial and business impact of the security breach, although it admitted that rising order processing delays and product outages mean that there will be a material impact on Q1 financial results.

Although not confirmed, the incident bears all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack, although there is no indication that data was stolen as part of the raid.

Darren Williams, CEO and founder at BlackFog, argued that the business impact of the breach on Clorox is not unusual.

“This outcome is consistent with our research, which shows that business downturn is a primary consequence of such cyber-attacks and often leads to customer frustration, financial losses and loss of trust in the business,” he added.

Editorial image credit: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.com