One of the largest cloud solution providers in the US, PCM Inc., has been hacked, according to the popular investigator, Brian Krebs.

PCM Inc offers technology products and services in IT solutions. Some of its biggest clients include Microsoft, Dell EMC and HPE. The company also serve some federal and state organisations.

Krebs claims that hackers managed to gain access to some of their clients’ emails and file sharing.

Sources say that information was stolen from the administrate credentials that PCM uses to manage its cloud-based and email sharing service, run by Office 365.

It’s thought that the hacker’s intention was to steal data that can be used in gift card fraud schemes.

Not the first time

This is very similar to the movements of hackers who targeted Indian IT outsourcing giants, Wipro. In April this year, Krebs reported that hackers had targeted their accounts trying to find anything that could be turned into cash, including using data from gift cards.

It is unsure if the two attacks are connected.

In a statement shared on KrebsOnSecurity, PCM said: “From its investigation, impact to its systems was limited and the matter has been remediated.”

It continues: “The incident did not impact all of PCM customers; in fact, investigation has revealed minimal-to-no impact to PCM customers. To the extent any PCM customers were potentially impacted by the incident, those PCM customers have been made aware of the incident and PCM worked with them to address any concerns they had.”

Cyber attacks and cloud security

Commenting on the situation, Ilia Kolochenko, founder and CEO of web security company ImmuniWeb, said modern cyber-attacks are often profit-based and sneaky. He says: “They won’t waste scarce resources and take the risks in frontal attacks on your castle, but will rather silently get in with one of your external suppliers or services providers. Nowadays, trusted third-parties often have virtually unlimited and uncontrolled access to crown jewels of many large companies and organisations.

In talking specifically about Cloud, Kolochenko said: “Growing competition forces many cloud providers to cut their internal costs in order to stay competitive thereby inevitably exacerbating the situation. Worse, many cloud providers don’t have sufficient capacities to detect sophisticated, long-lasting breaches and APTs, most of which eventually remain undetected and uninvestigated. What we see in the media is just the tip of the iceberg.”