Kronos Hacks potential downstream effects
Background:
News broke today concerning a hack against a company known as Kronos. Kronos is a payroll management company, that manages payroll for multiple companies and and government and municipal agencies. According to Yahoo News, the HR software provider may be down for weeks.
Potential down stream effects to be watching out for.
If employers cant find an alternative way of paying employees, paychecks could potentially be delayed. Given that our economy is in the fragile state that it is in, and given that we are right in. the middle of the Christmas Shopping season, this could potentially have downstream effects on the economy.
More importantly, this is is a good reminder for us all to have an emergency fund, that could cover us if something happened to our banks that prevented us from getting our money. Our economic system is based a shockingly few amount of companies that manage the backend of. payments to make sure that the right dollars and pennies go to the correct accounts at the correct times. If any of these companies get taken down by a cyber attack, it might mean we have to go for an amount of time without banking services. Dave Ramsey recommends an emergency fund big enough to cover 3-6 months of living expenses.
More Info:
- https://news.yahoo.com/kronos-warns-cyberattack-may-knock-000041287.html
- https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/kronos-hack-creates-employer-nightmare-over-christmas-pay-20211215-p59ht6
- https://www.wptv.com/news/local-news/investigations/kronos-ransomware-hack-threatens-businesses
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/12/13/kronos-ransomware-attack-2021/6501274001/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-14/kronos-warns-cyberattack-may-knock-hr-software-offline-for-weeks