Staples cyberattack disrupts online orders

BleepingComputer reports that outages at American office supply retail chain that disrupted online orders were confirmed to have been caused by a cyberattack. After determining a cybersecurity risk in its network on Nov. 27, Staples immediately moved to mitigate the threat, which affected its backend processing and product delivery, as well as its customer service systems and communication channels. While order processing at staples.com was impacted, operations at Staples stores continue. "All of our systems are in the process of coming back online, and we expect to return to normal functionality in short order. We may experience slight delays in the interim but expect to ship all orders that have been placed," said a Staples spokesperson. Such an attack, which was found to not involve any ransomware, comes after Essendant, a distributor owned by Staples, suffered from a days-long outage in March, as well as a data breach in 2020 that compromised the company's customer order information through an attack targeted at a vulnerable VPN endpoint.