The hack against Rackspace Technology It will have consequences of colossal magnitude. The effects on your unit emailwhich nets Rackspace $30 million annually, will cause “incremental costs associated” with the containment and remediation response to the hack, in addition to reputational costs and its impact on customer relationships, impossible to calculate monetarily.
Why does it matter? Rackspace Technology offers cloud computing services intrinsic to the digital economy. It allows your clients to contract the depth of service they need to avoid the fatigue of becoming “experts in everything”. Hundreds of companies outsource essential functions, such as email service, to Rackspace.
rack space suffered an attack with ransomware, malicious software to steal information and demand a ransom to release it. The extortive power of ransomware lies in the interruption of operations as a result of the hijacking of information.
The hack forced rack space to disconnect its Hosted Exchange service, for delivering and receiving email, on December 2, and to ask its clients to move to an outsourced service in Microsoft 360.
Rackspace’s other products and services “are fully operational,” reported the company to the SEC, the US financial regulator. Rackspace is a publicly traded technology company with a stock market valuation of nearly $700 million.
On Friday the 9th, in his twenty-first message Regarding the information security breach, Rackspace said that “more than two-thirds of our customers in the Hosted Exchange environment have had their email recovered.”
Just a client of rack space in Latin America was affected by the incident. “The client was assisted immediately and his operation did not experience a major impact,” a Rackspace spokeswoman told me when consulted on Saturday the 10th.
“The organization has increased support staff and is taking additional steps to help guide customers through this process to limit the impact on their own operations,” he added.
Some “incremental costs associated” with the attack against Rackspace are evident: the bill for hiring CrowdStrikea company specializing in response to incidents of cybersecurity; some cancellations from affected customers and, most likely, government sanctions and possible compensation. It is not clear if the ransom payment will have to be added to the hacker or hackers responsible for the attack. The company has not reported on this point.
Within a week of the hack, the shares of rack space in the stock market they lost 30% of their value: from 4.85 dollars to 3.23 on Friday, December 9.
The US Department of the Treasury estimates that $1 billion in payments were made in 2021 related to ransomware attacks, more than half the payments recorded the previous year, reported CNN one month ago.
The hack to Rackspace Technology It is another confirmation that in the information society there are three types of organizations: those that are going to be hacked, those that have already been hacked, and those that will be hacked again (in the middle are the negligent or careless ones).
“We remain focused on understanding the root cause of the incident and implementing additional security measures to defend against future cyber threats,” the Rackspace spokeswoman told me.
When a cyber attack puts the continuity of operations at risk, no reaction will be enough. There will always be loose ends that hurt the relationship with consumers. That is the goal of ransomware: hijack information, disable technological systems and demand a ransom to release the infrastructure taken after the chaos caused.
Providers and consumers of technological services need a response plan that assumes a proactive and assertive behavior, with transparent and honest communication.
rack space is the new company to register a cyber attack Devil brand. It won’t be the last. No one is exempt from being hacked. The lessons are worth learning: take the risk of working with information technology and have a handy manual in case of fire. It is about the reputation of companies and, above all, the relationship with their consumers.
