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The cyber-attack on analyst and accounting major Deloitte has affected clients in India, too.
According to company officials in the know, “the number of affected clients is going to grow as the company is still in the process of ascertaining facts and the quantum of leakage.”
An official requesting anonymity told BusinessLine :“An internal circular sent on Monday said the email accounts of employees had been compromised and classified messages leaked. So if I am dealing with six clients, the messages sent to all six have been compromised.”
In response to a query on the same, a Deloitte spokesperson said: “The attacker accessed data from an email platform. The review of that platform is complete. Importantly, the review enabled us to understand precisely what information was at risk and what the hacker actually did.”
“Only very few clients were impacted,” the company said, adding that it is “contacting each of the clients impacted”.
It was not possible to immediately ascertain which of Deloitte’s India clients’ data had been sabotaged.
Deloitte is one of the world’s largest audit and tax consultancy majors. It is popularly referred to be a part of the ‘Big Four’ group of companies, along with KPMG, EY and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Together, they provide consultancy to banks, governments and multinational companies. Till last year, Deloitte had the accounts of almost 52 per cent of all listed companies in India, industry observers said.
In the statement, Deloitte said the company is “implementing its comprehensive security protocol and initiating an intensive and thorough review, which included mobilising a team of cyber-security and confidentiality experts inside and outside of Deloitte, (and) contacting governmental authorities immediately after it became aware of the incident.”
According to a report in TheGuardian newspaper, emails to and from Deloitte’s 2,44,000 staff were stored in the Azure cloud service, which was provided by Microsoft. This is Microsoft’s equivalent to Amazon Web Service and Google’s Cloud Platform.
The newspaper also reported that the hackers had potential access to user names, passwords, IP addresses, architectural diagrams for businesses and health information. Some emails had attachments with sensitive security and design details.
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