Cognizant Expects To Lose Between $50M and $70M Following Ransomware Attack

IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. From a report: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services.

Sounds like ...

[matthelm007]

Sounds like they need to hire some IT experst!

Re:

[matthelm007]

And I need a smell clicker! (He he he)

Re:

[cusco]

Indeed. I bet a lot of their customers are looking for a new provider that hasn't let themselves get hacked.

Re:

[lessSockMorePuppet]

How about not hiring venture capital?

It seems like the trend these days is to bubble get that sweet, sweet VC money, and either sell off to Google or stage an inside job where you steal the VC/investor/company's funds in a "ransomware" attack.

  At least once, this has gone wrong and come to light. There are surely more.

Re:

[LostMyAccount]

I don't know about the ransomware attack, but there have been people who have claimed that the sheer size and amount of cash that Google. Apple and Microsoft have to spend on buying competitive innovators has actually hurt overall technology innovation because of exactly this. Technology startups are actually shaping their product specifically to attract buyouts from the big 3 versus technologies that would do something different or be disruptively competitive.

They paid the ransom?

[nnet]

They paid?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Well.. who'd have thought...

[beheaderaswp]

I've been a purely technical IT person with only 7 years of management experience.

This of course taught me a fine lesson: Don't trust an IT guy to make tax accounting decisions... the same way you don't trust an MBA to make technical decisions.

I'd be willing to bet that somewhere in this mess is an executive who shoved something really bad down the throat of their IT team. And right now management is leaning hard on their IT staff to fix the problem and accept blame.

Queue the outside security experts to sol

Microsoft Windows strikes again

[notdecnet]

“Maze is a particularly sophisticated strain of Windows ransomware [tripwire.com] that has hit companies and organizations around the world and demanded that a cryptocurrency payment be made in exchange for the safe recovery of encrypted data.”