Umbrella company Parasol confirms data breach linked to cyber attack five weeks ago
Umbrella company Parasol has confirmed that it’s investigating particulars of a data breach that has come to mild within the wake of a suspected ransomware attack on its programs final month.
Parasol, which is thought to have no less than 13,000 contractors on its books, despatched out an e mail earlier right now – signed by its CEO, Doug Crawford – during which it confirmed that its IT safety crew had found that “some data” had been copied and leaked on-line because the attack on its programs.
The data in query is referred to as belonging to Parasol’s mum or dad company, Optionis, which additionally owns a number of contractor-focused accountancy corporations, together with SJD Accountancy and Nixon Williams. Collectively, these entities are identified to present companies to about 28,000 contractors.
“Our security team has now detected that some data belonging to Optionis was copied from our system and we believe that some of that has been leaked online,” stated the company in an e mail seen by Computer Weekly.
“At this stage, we have not been able to ascertain the precise nature of the information. However, we are investigating this as an absolute priority.”
The e mail additional acknowledged that the “police and relevant authorities” have been notified concerning the occasions, and the company individually confirmed to Computer Weekly that it has made Action Fraud and the Information Commissioner’s Office conscious of the state of affairs.
In its e mail, Parasol stated that if it comes to go that non-public info belonging to its workers and contractors has been leaked throughout the breach, they are going to be notified instantly.
“We felt that it was important to let you know about this development and we can assure you that we will inform you as a matter of urgency should we uncover that personal data, which is likely to result in a high risk to you, has been leaked,” the e-mail added.
The data breach disclosure comes five weeks after the attack on Parasol’s programs, which was initially attributed to an unspecific programs outage earlier than the company confirmed on Sunday 16 January that “malicious activity” had been detected on its networks.
The attack prompted the company to proactively disable a number of of its exterior and back-office programs within the days following the attack, which is thought to have resulted in 1000’s of contractors throughout the UK experiencing disruption to their payday cycles.
As reported by Computer Weekly on 3 February 2022, a number of the affected contractors have been omitted of pocket by the assaults to the tune of 1000’s of kilos.
Computer Weekly contacted Optionis for additional particulars of the breach, and acquired the next assertion in response: “We can verify that we just lately suffered a cyber safety incident. With the assistance of exterior cyber safety consultants, we have now been conducting an pressing investigation and we now imagine that these accountable have launched some info on-line that was extracted from our programs.
“We are investigating the precise nature of this information as a priority and are communicating with those who may have been impacted. We would like to thank our partners, clients and employees for their ongoing patience and support as we continue to respond to this incident.”