The attack on accounting giant occurred on Monday, and the details remained sketchy as investigators piece the information together in crime scene investigation fashion.

A simple password does all the tricks

It was reportedly a single password was all its take to “slay” the Deloitte’s cyber-security on its email server through an administrator account. After successful login with password, the unauthorized user is able to access various areas which are otherwise restricted from outsiders and even staffs unless granted with the appropriate rights.

The focus of attack was locked on Deloitte’s asset at Rosslyn, Virginia, United States and the company immediately notified the authorities after the attack.

No privacy for staff emails

According to The Guardian, emails of around 244,000 staffs are exposed through this incident alone. Many of these emails were stored in the company’s Azure Microsoft’s Cloud service which consists of Deloitte user names, passwords, IP addresses, company architecture, and health information, based on media report from The Guardian.

So far, the hacking damage paled in comparison to recent cyber-attack seen in Equifax, where the details of around 143 million customers were leaked.

Victims claimed so far

As of now, none of the affected companies’ name were identified but six companies and some government agencies were among the victims. Perhaps the extent of the damage remained to be contested for a while as further investigation takes place. Apparently, Deloitte’s email system shows a history of being hacked, as previously in Oct-Nov 2016, which the company only acknowledged the hack four months later on March this year.

Not your average panama papers leak

The motive of the hack does not seem to be as noble as the panama papers leak which 11.5 million documents were leaked in a whistle-blowing manner to reveal offshore tax evasion and fraud. Like all corporations, Deloitte has its fair share of controversies and if a similar “panama papers driven leak” was on the mind of hackers, our guess will be on the incident of ActionAid.

Back in November 2013, Deloitte was accused by international non-governmental organization, ActionAid of using Mauritius as a tax haven to hide hundreds of millions of dollars from taxation by a list of poor African nations.

Most likely, Hackwarenews thinks that the breach in Deloitte’s email system is commercially motivated in revealing sensitive information for blackmailing purposes.

Striking Terror to the rest

Deloitte is currently in the lead among the “Big Four” or the world’s largest accounting and auditing services, booking an annual revenue over USD38 billion in fiscal year of 2017. Other in the Big Four includes PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), EY and KPMG.

By claiming Deloitte as its victim, the hacker certainly sent shockwaves to other accounting firms, telling that they may be next in line. Or perhaps, the message is clear that no one is safe in this cyber-age and often complacency and negligence prove to be the biggest culprit in security breaches.

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