Worried about your tax return? You might have good reason for concern.
As many are now aware, CCH, the cloud-based tax division of the global information services firm Wolters Kluwer suffered a service outage caused by a malware attack on May 6th.
According to Krebson Security, the company was warned on Friday May 3rd of vulnerabilities to their file directories and suspicious files already in play. CCH did respond quickly and the file directory for tax software downloads was taken offline.
From that point on, user access has been a problem and tax professionals have been left scrambling.
Here is the firm’s latest update…
On Monday May 6, our monitoring system alerted us to technical anomalies in a few of our applications and platforms. We immediately started investigating and detected the installation of malware. When we detected the malware, we proactively took a broad range of platforms, specifically including the CCH tax software applications, offline to protect our customers’ data and isolate the malware. The service interruptions our customers experienced are the result of our aggressive, precautionary efforts.
On May 7, we were able to begin restoring service to a number of applications and platforms. At this time, we have brought CCH Axcess, CCH SureTax, CCH AnswerConnect, and CCH Intelliconnect back online. Our process and protocols assure a high degree of confidence in the security of our applications and platforms before they are brought back online. We have seen no evidence that customer data and systems were compromised or that there was a breach of confidentiality of that data.
At this time, we have notified law enforcement and our investigation is ongoing. We regret any inconvenience this has caused, and we are fully committed to restoring remaining services as quickly as possible for our customers.
Wolters Kluwer has confirmed that this outage “is mainly centered in the US, not global, with exception of a few application in the UK. All the rest is up and running.”
DarkHound SecOps will keep this post updated as the story unfolds. Comment with your questions or contact us at [email protected].