The information services firm Wolters Kluwer has been battling to recover from a cyberattack that forced the company to shut down many of its tax and accounting software applications, which is causing issues for those using the affected products.
The company, a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services for clinicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, and tax, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and regulatory sectors, reported on May 6 it was experiencing network and service issues that forced it to take offline a number of its applications, this included some of its communications apps which limited its ability to tell its customers about the problem. The company said it was able to place some of its products back online on May 7, including CCH SureTax and CCH Axcess.
According to posts on the company’s Facebook page, one person said the outage is also affecting Taxprep T1 and Taxprep T3 locally installed software. Another noted that when she went to the CCH Software Delivery Manager to do update that is required, the message still says unable to connect to server.
Customers also posted to Facebook they were unhappy with the level of communication the company has offered regarding the outages.
“WK also needs more professional ways to communicate with corporate clients than through Facebook posts. We’re running businesses not planning reunions. I only found out about this thread from a google search. Facebook isn’t exactly my go-to for reliable information pertaining to business,” another said.
Wolters Kluwer did say all services have not been restored and it did not have an ETA on when that would happen, but company execs said its staff is working around the clock to bring everything back online. The company has not stated the type of cyberattack with which it was hit.
“Our process and protocols assure a high degree of confidence in the security of our applications and platforms before they are brought back online. We have seen no evidence that customer data and systems were compromised or that there was a breach of confidentiality of that data,” Wolters Kluwer said.
SC Media has attempted to contact Wolters Kluwer via Facebook, but has not heard a response.