The 87-page complaint, lodged Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, alleges that Cognizant agents repeatedly reset passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens for callers who posed as Clorox employees without asking a single security question. Clorox says it had provided Cognizant with strict credential-reset protocols such as verifying a manager’s name and sending confirmation emails, but that the vendor falsely assured the company its staff had been “educated” on the rules months before the breach. For now, Clorox says it has rebuilt its networks and returned to automated order processing, while Cognizant faces intensified scrutiny over how a routine support call spiraled into a crisis with sweeping operational and legal fallout. The Clorox Company, a leading household goods manufacturer, has filed a $380 million lawsuit against IT services provider Cognizant Technology Solutions. Clorox contends that misplaced trust allowed the Scattered Spider social-engineering group to paralyze manufacturing lines, force manual order processing, and incur roughly $49 million in remediation costs, as well as hundreds of millions in lost sales. According to the filing, the vendor took more than an hour to reinstall a security tool after the intruder disabled it, supplied an incorrect list of managed IP addresses, and dispatched engineers who lacked basic knowledge of Clorox’s environment, forcing the manufacturer to hire another firm. The lawsuit accuses Cognizant’s help-desk agents of inadvertently providing hackers with access to Clorox’s network during a security breach in August 2023. “Clorox hired Cognizant for a narrow scope of help-desk services, which Cognizant reasonably performed,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday. Beyond the initial access, Clorox accuses Cognizant of botching the emergency response. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis.
This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:50:06 +0000