Payroll Service Kronos Offline After Ransomware Attack

The Log4Shell vulnerability has affected workforce management and human resources (HR) cloud provider Kronos, the company warned users in a blog post last updated Monday (Dec. 13).

Log4Shell is a security flaw found in things like online games, enterprise software, cloud data centers and more. It has a zero-day vulnerability, which means organizations affected don’t have any time to patch their systems afterward.

Kronos first alerted its users to a problem on Saturday (Dec. 11), saying in a later blog post that the company “took immediate action to investigate and mitigate the issue.”

The attack forced Kronos to take its systems offline “possibly for the next several weeks,” per a report from Ars Technica, although the company hasn’t confirmed whether the vulnerability was what was used to take the systems offline.

On Sunday (Dec. 12), Kronos said the services had been unavailable for the past day and that the attack had taken down the Kronos UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff and Banking Scheduling Solutions services.

In that Sunday post, Kronos representative Leo Daley said there still wasn’t any estimated restoration time, and that the issue could take several days to fix.

“We continue to recommend that our impacted customers evaluate alternative plans to process time and attendance data for payroll processing, to manage schedules, and to manage other related operations important to their organization,” Daley said.

In another advisory, Daley said the company deeply regretted the impact and was taking “all appropriate actions” to fix things.

However, neither advisory mentioned the ransomware which attackers used to get into the infrastructure, though a banner at the top of the posts made mention of the “log4j vulnerability” and that the company was using emergency patching processes to fix the issues.

PYMNTS writes that cybersecurity has been a priority as many professionals had to adapt to working from home, with companies having to rebuild their cybersecurity infrastructures from scratch and working to figure out how to protect organizations’ data.

See also: 60% of US and UK Businesses Report Cross-Border Payment Fraud as Pain Point

Sixty percent of U.S. and U.K. businesses are facing cross-border pay fraud, per data from the PYMNTS and Worldpay Global B2B Payments Playbook. The bad actors come as companies’ defenses were down, with more risk of business-to-business (B2B) theft and fraud.

With more growth in cross-border commerce, including $10 trillion in flows between global businesses every year, there are still obstacles as businesses struggle with old-style paper workflows, fraud and payment delays.