Rackspace Technology ransomware attack caused an outage

Rackspace Technology, a Texas-based cloud computing company, announced that suffering from a ransomware attack that targeted their Hosted Exchange environment resulted in an outage. The company described the incident as an isolated disruption and has taken proactive measures to mitigate it.

In a released incident report, Rackspace said that the launched investigation was led by its internal security team and a separate cybersecurity defence service. The incident’s analysis is still in its initial stages; thus, no details can be shared.

 

It has yet to be discovered whether sensitive customer data were affected in the Rackspace attack.

 

The tech company told their customers that they would provide more updates once they gathered developments from the ongoing investigation. Currently, there is no evidence that hackers have accessed customers’ databases.

Additionally, the company believes that the attack incident was isolated to its Hosted Exchange environment, which caused an outage in its operations. Nonetheless, they assured that all their other products and services remain operational and that the incident had not affected its email platform and product line.

However, Rackspace fears a massive loss of revenue will be experienced due to the attack’s impact, specifically on the affected Hosted Exchange business, which generates about $30 million of annual revenue in the company’s apps and cross-platform segment.

The ongoing investigation would also contribute to the tech company’s costs in resolving the issue.

Some affected Hosted Exchange environment services are MAPI/RPC, POP, IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync, and the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface. After learning of the incident, the company immediately shut down the affected platform and disconnected it from its activity.

While the tech company is still addressing the outage, they have provided customers with MS Exchange Plan 1 licenses and detailed directions on migrating to MS 365. Furthermore, the customers are given a forwarding option to automatically redirect all emails sent to a Hosted Exchange user to another email address.

Rackspace’s management cannot yet disclose how long the mitigation process will take, but they assured their customers that they could assist them with any help they need to raise.