Pierluigi Paganini April 19, 2020

IT services giant Cognizant suffered a ransomware attack on Friday, according to BleepingComputer company was hit by the Maze Ransomware crew.

Information technologies services giant Cognizant is the last victim of a ransomware attack, according to BleepingComputer the attack was launched by the Maze Ransomware gang.

Cognizant is an American multinational corporation that provides IT services, it is one of the largest IT managed services company in the world with over $16 billion in revenue.

On Friday, the company sent a security breach notification mail to its clients and shared IoCs related to the threat that affected its systems.

“On Friday, Cognizant began emailing their clients, stating that they had been compromised and included a “preliminary list of indicators of compromise identified through our investigation.” Clients could then use this information to monitor their systems and further secure them.” reported BleepingComputer.

The IOCs provided by the company are associated with past infections attributed to the Maze Ransomware crew, it included IP addresses of servers and file hashes for the kepstl32.dll, memes.tmp, and maze.dll files.

BleepingComputer reached out Maze operators for a comment, but the denied being involved in the attack.

If Maze operators were behind the attack, they likely breached the company network for a long time during which they have stolen credentials and exfiltrated sensitive data.

“It is possible that an attack was conducted but failed to encrypt any devices.” concludes BleepingComputer.

“If the Maze operators conducted this attack, they were likely present in Cognizant’s network for weeks, if not longer.”

Data Breach Notification service UnderTheBreach noticed that on April 11, an operator in the cybercrime underground offered for sale the access to a big enterprise, they speculate the big organizations could be Cognizant.

Since December, the victims of the Maze Ransomware are facing another threat because operators behind the malware threaten them to publish their data online.

The Maze operators have created a “data leak” site that is used to publish stolen data from victims that did not pay the ransom.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Cognizant, hacking)

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