US firm Clorox sues Cognizant for $380 million over a 2023 cyberattack

Cognizant Technology Solutions has been served with a $380 million lawsuit by Clorox, an American cleaning and disinfecting products company. Clorox claims that Cognizant was squarely responsible for a 2023 cyber hack that cost the bleach maker $380 million in damages.

The bleach maker said that the hacker merely asking the tech company’s staff for its employees’ passwords, and Cognizant’s “entirely preventable errors” cost Clorox “hundreds of millions of dollars” in business interruption losses.

The cyberattack impeded Clorox’s ability to ship orders and keep its products on the shelves of retailers, Clorox said in the lawsuit, a copy of which is available with businessline.

Cognizant provided service desk solutions for Clorox employees, which they could contact when they needed password recovery or reset assistance. “Cognizant repeatedly gave a cybercriminal access to Clorox’s network by handing them credentials without properly authenticating them or otherwise following Clorox’s process,” the lawsuit says.

It further added that the cyberattack was not sophisticated in nature and the cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed over the credentials, says the lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda.

The lawsuit says the cyber criminal then used the credentials obtained to attack Clorox. This paralysed the company’s corporate-network and crippled business operations.

“The root cause of the cyber attack was Cognizant’s blatant disregard for Clorox’s credential support policies and procedures, industry standards and the terms of the parties’ Information Technology Services Agreement,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit comes at a time when Cognizant is already embroiled in a legal battle against Infosys, which has filed filed an antitrust case on Cognizant.

Cognizant spokesperson on the lawsuit said, “It is shocking that a corporation the size of Clorox had such an inept internal cybersecurity system to mitigate this attack. Clorox has tried to blame us for these failures, but the reality is that Clorox hired Cognizant for a narrow scope of help desk services which Cognizant reasonably performed. Cognizant did not manage cybersecurity for Clorox.

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Published on July 23, 2025