Nestlé is denying reports that it was the target of a cyberattack with an unusual explanation – the company accidentally hacked itself.
A group of computer hackers calling itself Anonymous claimed over the March 19-20 weekend that it managed to access a tranche of Nestlé’s internal data, including emails and passwords. Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for numerous high-profile cyberattacks on governments and businesses, says this was in response to Nestlé’s refusal to stop doing business in Russia.
However, Nestlé told Gizmodo, a digital technology website, that the data in question had in fact been accidentally leaked by the company itself. Nestlé said that this happened during a functionality check of a test website, and that the “predominantly publicly available” data was only accessible for a few weeks.
A review by Cybernews.com showed that the data sample released by Anonymous to back up its claim amounted to 5.7 MB, a fraction of the 10 GB of data it claimed to have accessed.
Nestlé did in fact further scale back its Russian operations this week, after being directly criticized by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
