Upon learning of the incident on July 24th, the networking equipment giant discovered that the attacker tricked an employee and gained access to a third-party cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system used by Cisco.

This allowed the threat actor to steal the personal and user information of individuals with Cisco.com user accounts, including names, organization names, addresses, Cisco-assigned user IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, and account metadata such as creation dates.

"We are implementing further security measures to mitigate the risk of similar incidents occurring in the future, including re-educating personnel on how to identify and protect against potential vishing attacks."

"After becoming aware of the incident, the actor's access to that CRM system instance was immediately terminated and Cisco commenced an investigation. Cisco has engaged with data protection authorities and notified affected users where required by law," the company said.