Hackers Take Clorox To The Cleaners In $49 Million Cyberattack

Cyberattacks are no joke, as they’ll clean out your systems, bank account and your mental and physical health, regardless of whether or not there was a ransom involved. This is precisely what consumer and professional cleaning products brand Clorox found from its August-thru-September 2023 cyberattack, which has cost the company $49 million in expenses to recover from. The company, which employs 8,700 people and serves 100 markets in 25 countries, is also expecting that there will be lingering effects from this attack, which will follow it into FY2024.

Back on Monday, August 14, 2023, the Clorox company detected unauthorized access to its information technology systems which originally began on August 11. With this, the Clorox company stopped the intrusion and remediated the problems, including taking systems offline and bringing in third-party cybersecurity experts to support. Despite these efforts, the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure explains that “the incident resulted in wide-scale disruptions to the Company’s business operations throughout the remainder of the quarter ended September 30, 2023.”


These impacts included product outages, processing delays, negative net sales and earnings, and other general system disruptions. Due to all of this, the company incurred approximately $49 million in expenses by the end of December 2023. Primarily, these costs are related “to third-party consulting services, including IT recovery and forensic experts and other professional services incurred to investigate and remediate the attack, as well as incremental operating costs incurred from the resulting disruption to the Company’s business operations.” Going forward, while there may still be financial impacts felt, it is expected that these will lessen over time as recovery progresses.

At present, it is unclear who the threat actor is behind the attack or what exactly was compromised in the security breach. Regardless, it shows that nearly any company can be vulnerable to this type of thing and that everyone should have a plan in case of attack.