Western Digital has confirmed that sensitive personal information was stolen by hackers, prompting the company to take its store offline and notify customers of the data breach.
In an statement, the company cautioned that the database containing customers’ data had been compromised during the attack.
According to Western Digital, during its investigation, it was discovered that an unauthorised party had accessed a database containing limited personal information of the company’s online store customers around March 26, 2023.
“The information included customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers. As a security measure, the relevant database stored, in encrypted format, hashed passwords (which were salted) and partial credit card numbers,” the company said.
Cyber-attack disrupts Western Digital’s cloud services
After detecting a network breach on March 26th, Western Digital found that the cyber-attack had resulted in the theft of company data, leading the company to issue a data breach notification.
Following the attack, Western Digital responded by temporarily shutting down its cloud services and various mobile, desktop, and web applications for two weeks.
According to a report, an unidentified group of hackers breached Western Digital and allegedly exfiltrated ten terabytes of data. While the perpetrators disavowed any association with the ALPHV ransomware gang, they attempted to extort Western Digital through their data leak site, potentially connecting them to the extortion group.
On April 28th, the threat actors released a message in which they flaunted their continued access to Western Digital’s network by sharing screenshots of emails, documents, and applications that they had stolen.
The hackers further boasted of having pilfered a customer information-containing SAP Backoffice database, displaying a screenshot of invoices that seemingly belong to customers.
Subsequently, no additional data has been disclosed by the perpetrators, implying that they might be leveraging the stolen information to extort Western Digital in exchange for a ransom payment.
