Secure data sharing solutions provider Kiteworks (formerly Accellion) over the weekend instructed customers to shut down their servers in response to credible threat intelligence from federal authorities.
In a communication to customers on Friday, the company advised a “nine-hour precautionary shutdown” of on-premises and customer-hosted instances, noting that hackers may target zero-day vulnerabilities in its products.
On Sunday, the company announced it had lifted the shutdown recommendation for all customers, and that they could bring their systems back online.
“Customers with self-hosted Advanced Forms should contact Customer Support for assistance. All systems Kiteworks hosts on customers’ behalf have been brought back up and are operating normally,” the company said.
While Kiteworks’s announcement did not detail the threat, the company said in emails to its customers that a severe vulnerability in its Advanced Forms secure data collection product triggered the shutdown.
“Advanced Forms is enabled for fewer than 1% of our customers, under 50 organizations, and the vulnerability is confined to that product only. All other products, including the DPE, file collaboration, file transfer, email encryption, APIs, and MFT, are unaffected,” a copy of the email shared on Reddit reads.
The company said it had no evidence the security defect was exploited and that it was working with “industry partners, including Mandiant, to share intelligence about the threat”.