Workday has fallen victim to a data breach, with the finance and HR giant revealing itself to be the latest firm hit by recent social engineering campaigns targeting many large organisations.

Disclosing the incident in a blog post on Friday (15 August), Workday said that threat actors had accessed some information from its third-party CRM platform, with the firm acting quickly to cut the attacker’s access and add extra safeguards to protect against similar incidents.

Workday stressed that, so far, there is no indication of hackers accessing customer tenants or the data within them.

However, the firm admitted that the attackers did obtain some commonly available business contact information, like names, email addresses, and phone numbers, which could potentially further their social engineering scams.

“It’s important to remember that Workday will never contact anyone by phone to request a password or any other secure details. All official communications from Workday come through our trusted support channels,” the company warned.  

As with other recent incidents targeting global companies and brands, including Google, Adidas, Louis Vuitton, and Chanel, Workday said that the hackers had initially contacted employees by text or phone, pretending to be from human resources or IT, attempting to trick employees into giving up account access or personal information.

Meanwhile, London-headquartered Colt Technology Services disclosed last week that it was working to mitigate the impact of its own cyber incident, which forced the firm to take some of its systems offline.

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In a series of updates, the tech company – which operates 75,000 km of fibre networks for 900 data centres across 30 countries – said that the incident was first detected on an internal system, separate from customer infrastructure; however, as of writing, some services were still unavailable to clients as the firm worked to resolve the problem.

According to reports from Bleeping Computer, a member of the WarLock ransomware gang has already claimed an attack on Colt, reportedly offering to sell around a million documents stolen from the firm for $200,000 (£147,707).

A spokesperson for Colt told Bleeping Computer that the firm was already aware of and investigating the claims, but that its technical team was focused on restoring the systems.