Accellion

Accellion, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in secure file sharing and collaboration, targeted towards businesses. The company was founded in 1999 in Singapore and is now based in Palo Alto, California. In 2020, the company stated that its products were used by over 3,000 organizations. Beginning in late 2020, a zero-day exploit on a legacy product led to data breaches of dozens of government and private organizations, in multiple countries.
History.
Accellion was founded in Singapore in 1999, originally focused on distributed file storage. The company moved to Palo Alto, California, focusing on secure file transmission. Accellion reached a total funding of about $35 million in 2011, and it was valued at $500 million in 2014. The company's chief executive officer, Yorgen Edholm, credited aversion to "National Security Agency–style snooping" as a factor in their success. In 2020, the company stated that it was used by 25 million users, across over 3,000 organizations.
Software.
Accellion was working on file transfer systems by late 2002. The company released a file transfer appliance in 2005, a physical machine aiming to reduce server load when sending large files. In March 2011, the company released an online file collaboration product, emphasizing security. In 2012, the company launched a service allowing file sharing between mobile devices. It included a synchronization feature called kitedrive. Early demand for the company's file transfer applications came from organizations that needed to transfer large files, including healthcare companies and universities.
In January 2014, Accellion launched kiteworks, a file sharing product allowing users to edit files and projects remotely, with interoperability with services like Google Drive and Dropbox. That December, the company released a set of programming interfaces extending secure file access to mobile devices. "PCMag" reviewer Fahmida Y. Rashid gave kiteworks a 3.5 out of 5 stars, praising its interface, support for mobile devices, and privacy tools.
2020–21 security breaches.
In mid-December 2020, the company's File Transfer Appliance product—now a 20-year-old legacy system—was subject to a zero-day exploit, which was patched on December 23. Three additional vulnerabilities were discovered and patched over the next month. The first vulnerability was a SQL injection, allowing an attacker to use a web shell to run arbitrary commands and extract data. The four vulnerabilities were assigned Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) codes 2021-27101 through 2021-27104 on February 16, 2021.
The exploit has affected around 300 organizations worldwide, including Kroger, Shell Oil Company, the University of California system, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Singtel. Data stolen includes Social Security numbers and other identification numbers, images of passports, financial information, and emails. According to computer security firm FireEye, the attackers comprised two hacking groups: one with ties to "Clop", a ransomware group, and one connected to financial crime group "FIN11". Many victims received extortion emails containing a .onion link to a website containing data dumps of multiple organizations. Prior to the attacks, Accellion had maintained that the FTA was a legacy product nearing the end of its life, with support ending on April 30, 2021, asking customers to move to their kiteworks system. David Kennedy, CEO of corporate incident response firm TrustedSec, said that "[t]he Accellion zero days were particularly damaging because actors were mass-exploiting this vulnerability quickly, and the severity of this wasn't being communicated from Accellion".