Mr. Cooper, a major mortgage lender in the United States, was recently hit by a cyberattack. The incident has led to massive disruption and outage of the company’s systems and endpoints.
The aftermath of the temporary shutdown of the lender’s services caused users not to be able to pay loans online. According to the company, it tracked down the incident on 31st October. They then took “immediate actions” to protect sensitive customer data and prevent serious repercussions.
The nature of the attack is yet to be disclosed officially. However, the company’s intentional shutdown of some services following the incident suggests it might have been a ransomware attack. Mr. Cooper asserted that the company would actively investigate the cyberattack to find out if any customer data was compromised.
The company confirmed that it informed its customers of the cyberattack soon after it was detected. However, users were warned to stay observant while responding to any emails or messages purportedly from Mr. Cooper’s employees. That’s because data theft may have occurred. The company suggests its users be cautious and verify the genuineness of any communication received.
This is not the only case of leading services facing system downtimes. In August, Clorox, the cleaning product giant, reported a cybersecurity incident forcing it to pull some of its services offline.
Clorox immediately reported the cyberattack in regulatory filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company promised to roll out a diligent investigation in collaboration with the law enforcement agency. It also made assurances that it would take necessary measures to prevent further losses.
“The Clorox Company has identified unauthorised activity on some of its Information Technology (IT) systems. 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 an 8-K filing.
“The Company is working diligently to respond to and address this issue and is also coordinating with law enforcement. To the extent possible, and in line with its business continuity plans, Clorox has implemented workarounds for certain offline operations in order to continue servicing its customers.”
In another separate occurrence, Microsoft 365 encountered unplanned downtimes that affected the company’s widely used Teams application. In September, users in North America reported experiencing delays. And, in some cases, they had failures while sending and receiving messages on the productivity platform. It’s the ninth outage for Microsoft 365 in as many months. However, the company responded immediately to the incident and brought the service to normal operation within a few hours.
Unplanned downtimes can occur due to an application failure, system outage, cyberattack, or other catastrophic IT event. Whatever the reason is, such downtimes can lead to serious repercussions—operational disruptions, hampered credibility, financial loss, and more.
The frequent occurrence of system outages of leading services highlights the need for the implementation of robust disaster recovery measures from expert services such as Protera. Leveraging disaster recovery services helps businesses prepare for and proactively address the impacts of technical disruptions, cyberattacks, or natural disasters.
Sohela is an electrical engineer and a self-professed writer with a keen interest in all things tech. When she’s not writing killer content pieces, you’ll find her enjoying tempting foods in her favourite restaurants.
