Ingram Micro should be given breathing space to gather all the facts on last week’s cyber-attack, a UK partner leader who attended a tight-knit call on the incident last night has asserted.
Guy Hocking, MD of Utilize, was one of around 20 Trust X Alliance council members who joined the briefing, which was led by top Ingram CMO Jennifer Anaya and EVP, President North America Bill Brandel.
Ingram publicly acknowledged it had suffered a ransomware attack on Saturday, two days after its website and systems suffered an outage.
“They’re a global distributor, and they’ve got lots of people drawing unhelpful conclusions,” Hocking told IT Channel Oxygen after attending the call, which took place at 5pm UK time.
“I think it’s important they have the time to gather all the facts, instead of shooting from the hip and communicating too early.
“They’ve also got to consider the hackers are obviously watching, and from their perspective they don’t want to divulge what they’ve found out.”
“Important progress”
Ingram also yesterday posted an update to a blog site dedicated to the incident, saying it had made “important progress on restoring our transactional business”.
“Subscription orders, including renewals and modifications, are available globally and are being processed centrally via Ingram Micro’s support organisation,” the update read.
“Additionally, we are now able to process orders received by phone or email from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, India, and China. Some limitations still exist with hardware and other technology orders, which will be clarified as orders are placed.”
Despite this, Ingram partners reported to us today that they still don’t have any visibility into stock, inventory or current orders.
“Without any idea of visibility on timeline, resellers will now need to mitigate their end-customer impact, who are mostly not aware of the distributor role in the channel – they simply will want their reseller orders fulfilled,” the leader of one Ingram partner – who wished to remain anonymous – told us.
Hocking said the Ingram execs were “keen to emphasise that it was internal systems [that have been impacted] and that they’ve taken their external systems down as a matter of precaution”.
“It’s a very sensitive issue and anyone who’s been through either remediation of such things for customers, or actually been directly affected themselves, will know what a challenge it is,” Hocking said.
“Cyber threats are an evolving, persistent challenge across the entire channel and for me this event is a reminder that even the largest, most prepared organisations aren’t immune.
“It just brings it closer to home.
“It’s a question of when, not if, and Ingram just happens to be the next one in that chain.
“We’re doing everything we can as a partner to support them, but over communicating is equally a mistake as under communicating. I think that they’ve got the balance pretty bang on.”
An Ingram Micro representative confirmed the call had taken place, adding that the company is “communicating with our customers as much as possible to provide support and regular updates”.
