Conduent says January cyber attack compromised clients’ end users’ personal data

IT service giant Conduent said that the confidential personal information of its clients was compromised during a data security incident it suffered earlier this year.

 

Headquartered in Florham Park, New Jersey, Conduent is an enterprise IT services giant that caters to half of Fortune 100 companies and more than 600 government and transportation agencies. 

 

In January, the company said it suffered an operational outage that affected its clients’ ability to take payments via electronic transfer or EBT cards. In a statement shared with the media, a company spokesperson said that the operational outage was caused by a significant “cyber security incident.”

 

“This incident was contained and all systems have been restored. Maintaining system integrity and functionality is as important to us as it is to our clients,” the company said in a statement shared with the media.

 

In a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Conduent said that on January 13, it was a victim of a data security incident that caused the operational outage. The incident involved an unauthorised threat actor infiltrating the company’s internal network.

 

The company immediately launched an investigation, with assistance from eternal cyber security experts, to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

 

“As part of its ongoing investigation, the Company determined that the threat actor exfiltrated a set of files associated with a limited number of the Company’s clients. 

 

“Due to the complexity of the files, the Company engaged cybersecurity data mining experts to evaluate the exfiltrated data and was recently informed of its nature, scope and validity, confirming that the data sets contained a significant number of individuals’ personal information associated with our clients’ end-users.

 

“To the Company’s knowledge, the exfiltrated data has not been released on the dark web or otherwise publicly,” reads the SEC filing. Conduent added that the disruption did not have a material impact on the company’s operations. 

 

“While the Company did not experience material impacts to its operating environment or costs from the event itself, the Company has incurred and accrued material non-recurring expenses in the first quarter related to the event based on potential notification requirements,” Conduent added.