Oakland, CA — On Monday, Clorox warned of the substantial impact of last month’s vast cyberattack on their product availability, also forecasting a significant effect on their first-quarter earnings. The company flagged prolonged order processing delays and chronic product shortages as the key threats to their projected earnings.
The California-based firm is still in the process of weighing the full financial and business implications of the broad cyber assault, which was uncovered on August 14. In a recent regulatory filing, the company admitted that the unauthorized intrusion had caused extensive damage to multiple sections of its IT infrastructure, resulting in widespread operational disruptions.
Despite their swift proactive measures to halt and tackle the issue, including temporarily shutting down several systems, the company acknowledges they are still facing the fallout from the breach. The company had to resort to manual order and process procedures, hampering the rate of operations and leading to significant consumer product availability issues.
The company asserts that the unauthorized activities have been successfully reined in and that they are currently repairing the damaged infrastructure and reinstating the offline systems. Despite the resumption of production at an overwhelming majority of manufacturing sites, the company remains uncertain about the timeframe needed to return to normal operations.
Clorox is holding off on providing a projection of the long-term impacts on its financial outlook until the full recovery is achieved. They clarified this decision at a time when other major businesses like MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment have also been victims of serious cyberattacks.
These cases have severely disrupted company operations, and in certain instances, led to the exposure of sensitive customer data. For instance, MGM reported a system-wide outage that compromised its headquarters as well as its various properties and websites. Caesars, on the other hand, discovered that unauthorized actors had acquired a copy of their customer loyalty program database, which detailed phone numbers and Social Security numbers among other data.
Morgan Wright, a top security adviser at SentinelOne, pointed out that the rise in such incidents highlights inherent flaws in the software commonly used by organizations to protect themselves. He noted that often these software are unable to prevent an attack before it is launched and is sometimes even easily defeated. Wright also warned of the potential for higher-cost goods owing to heavier regulations or more occurrences of personal information exposure and possible identity theft due to these persistent threats.
