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The telco giant said in an SEC filing that operational shutdowns could lead to a “material” impact and that personal information was accessed.
In a 15 April filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), US telecommunications company Frontier Communications reported what appeared to be a serious cyber attack.
According to the filing, the incident was detected on 14 April, when the company detected an unauthorised third party “had gained unauthorised access to portions of its information technology environment”.
Frontier took action to contain the incident and was forced to shut down some of its systems.
“Upon detection, the company initiated its previously established cyber incident response protocols and took measures to contain the incident,” Frontier said in its SEC filing.
“As part of this process, the containment measures, which included shutting down certain of the company’s systems, resulted in an operational disruption that could be considered material.”
A material risk is any incident that may impact the decisions of investors.
However, Frontier also noted in the same filing that it did not expect that the incident would impact its finances.
“The company continues to investigate the incident, has engaged cyber security experts, and has notified law enforcement authorities,” Frontier said.
“The company does not believe the incident is reasonably likely to materially impact the company’s financial condition or results of operations.”
Frontier believes, according to the filing, that the likely threat actor was a “cyber crime group”. However, so far, no groups have claimed responsibility for the hack. Frontier has also said that it believes the hackers did gain access to “personally identifiable information” (PII) as well as “other information”.
What that information is and just how much PII the cyber criminals got away with is currently unknown. Frontier is in the process of restoring its systems.
“As of the date of this filing, the company believes it has contained the incident and has restored its core information technology environment and is in the process of restoring normal business operations,” Frontier said.
The company does not appear to have made a filing with Texas’ Office of the Attorney-General regarding any data breach. Frontier did have a statement on its website last week warning of ongoing technical issues, but as of writing, the company’s website is returning a 403 error.
It is unknown if this outage is related to the cyber attack.
Frontier Communications serves 25 US states and has roughly 3.5 million customers and a fibre optic network that serves 5.2 million locations.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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