Clorox yet to fully recover from August cyber attack, confirms impact on financials

American cleaning products giant Clorox said it is still in the process of recovering from a cyber attack it suffered in August that affected its daily predations.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Clorox said that it identified “unauthorised activity” in some of its internal systems in August and immediately launched an investigation, with assistance from third party cyber security experts, to understand the nature and scope of the incident.

“After becoming aware of the activity, the Company began taking steps to stop and remediate the activity, including taking certain systems offline,” the company said in its initial 8-K filing.

Clorox added that it is “working diligently” with the help of law enforcement agencies to respond to the cyber security incident.

In a recent filing with the SEC, the company said that it has activated its “business continuity plans and began manual ordering and processing procedures shortly thereafter at a reduced rate of operations.”

“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,” the filing reads.

Clorox confirmed that the security incident has been contained “due to the steps the Company has taken to address the incident.”  However, Clorox is still in the process of repairing the infrastructure and is reintegrating the systems that were proactively taken offline.

“The cybersecurity attack damaged portions of the Company’s IT infrastructure, which caused widescale disruption of Clorox’s operations.

“The Company expects to begin the process of transitioning back to normal automated order processing the week of Sept. 25. 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 normalised operations,” Clorox added in its filing.

Clorox believes that the security incident that led to order processing delays will have a material impact on its financial results, however, the exact impact of the same is yet to be evaluated. The company said it will share an update regarding the incident’s financial impact as and when available.