(WAND) - A crippling attack from ransomware hackers at a major payroll company is threatening paychecks before Chirstmas for employees of some companies.
The targeted company was Kronos, which is one of the largest American workforce management companies. It was hit Saturday with ransomware, per NBC News, and said Monday its programs relying on cloud services, which some companies use for paying employees and managing hours, will be down for "several weeks."
A Kronos spokesperson declined to say which ransomware group was involved in this attack, whether Kronos planned to pay them, or the amount demanded from hackers. They also declined to provide a full list of affected customers.
Affected companies include Whole Foods, GameStop and Honda, along with some state and local government agencies. Those agencies include the state of West Virginia and the city of Cleveland, and they rely on the hacked company for employee payroll and scheduling.
A Whole Foods employee told NBC News they're afraid they might not get paid Friday.
“Whole Foods has instructed us to use a paper punch sheet to keep track of our hours & our Team Leads have been instructed to hand write the schedule, since the schedule writing system is also down,” she said in an email.
Rachel Malish, a Whole Foods spokesperson, said the company discovered a way to pay employees on Friday and sent a memo to workers Wednesday.
Honda is working to help its employees during the outage.
“Like many companies, Honda’s timekeeping system has been impacted by the outage,” Marcos Frommer, a spokesperson for Honda North America, said. “The outage has resulted in a temporary disruption to our payroll reporting system. Honda is taking steps to minimize the impact to our associates. We’re continuing to work closely with UKG to resolve this issue.”
GameStop did not respond when NBC News reached out for a comment.
With ransomware, hackers are able to remotely lock computers and demand payment for the computers to be fixed and to not publicly reveal their contents. President Joe Biden's administration is working to take steps to boost U.S. cybersecurity, and the Department of Defense has admitted to sometimes knocking international ransomware actors offline, NBC News said.
