Lessons for M&S from other cyber attacks

As Marks & Spencer (M&S) – and its clients – proceed to reel from a serious cyber assault, different individuals who have gone by related experiences have been sharing what it’s wish to be focused by hackers.

“It was an absolute nightmare,” says Sir Dan Moynihan. He’s the Senior Govt Principal and Chief Govt of the Harris Federation, a bunch of 55 faculties within the London and Essex space.

It was hacked in 2021 – Sir Dan told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that the culprits have been the Russian ransomware crime group REvil.

“Their goal was to blackmail us into paying $4m (£3m) in cryptocurrency inside ten days,” he mentioned.

“If we did not pay in 10 days, they needed eight million.”

The hack brought on chaos. Sir Dan mentioned the group misplaced instructing supplies, lesson plans and registration programs.

Extra importantly, additionally they misplaced medical information and even the fireplace and telephone programs have been affected.

The funds of the college group have been hit. Employees, and payments, have been left unpaid.

M&S has additionally been focused with ransomware – malicious software program which locks an proprietor out of their laptop or community and scrambles their information.

The criminals then demand a payment to unlock it. Sir Dan says it was a requirement he resisted.

As a substitute, the college group approached a agency of cyber specialists who employed a hostage negotiator. That particular person then took on the position of an inexperienced faculty bursar – an administrator – who pretended to not know what was happening.

They took up negotiations with the hackers, with the aim of delaying them for so long as attainable so the college group may rebuild its programs.

“The Russians had stolen information from us – they did not inform us what – and so they threatened to place these things up on the darkish internet and trigger us nice embarrassment, and secondly they might lock down our programs.”

Sir Dan mentioned it took the Harris Federation three months to get the whole lot working once more, at the price of £750,000. Among the many work was 30,000 units that wanted to be “cleaned” following the hack.

Was there ever a query of giving the criminals what they needed? By no means, mentioned the college group boss.

“The cash now we have is for deprived younger folks, and secondly had we paid we might have opened the door for different faculty teams to be attacked.”

It isn’t identified whether or not related scenes are taking part in out behind the scenes at M&S, as the corporate has solely issued restricted info in its official statements, and has not put anybody up for interview.

However folks claiming to work for the retailer have given a way of the chaos on social media.

On Reddit, customers who recognized themselves as M&S employees, one thing the BBC has not verified, described the affect of the cyber assault.

One wrote that the majority inside programs had been affected and that there had been experiments with “resuming operations manually with paper and pen”.

One other poster mentioned head workplace workers have been working weekends, and that the issues have been “like going again in time”.

Whereas some reported shortfalls in items coming in, others described oversupply of some objects, which meant meals went to waste – with one saying they needed to pour away a number of pints of milk.

What is obvious is different firms are watching what’s occurring intently, much more so since one other retailer, the Co-op, shut down a few of its IT programs this week in response to a separate cyber attack.

“We’re patching like mad,” is what one retailer instructed the BBC.

In different phrases, they’re ensuring each a part of system has probably the most up-to-date software program and protections.

Sir Charlie Mayfield, the previous chairman of John Lewis, mentioned different corporations understood solely too properly how weak they have been.

“On-line buying has fully remodeled retail – as expertise turns into extra pervasive, the chance of this sort of assault rises with it,” he instructed the BBC.

Based on the cyber safety breaches survey, performed by the UK authorities, 74% of huge companies mentioned they have been focused with cyber assaults final yr.

The expertise of being hacked is usually a tough one for people caught within the disruption.

Marriage ceremony costume designer Catherine Deane mentioned it was “devastating” when her firm’s Instagram account was hacked.

“It felt just like the rug had been pulled from beneath us. Instagram is our major social platform, and we have invested probably the most period of time and enterprise sources into it.

“To maintain the account present we publish content material daily. Abruptly all this work… it was simply pulled.”

She told the BBC last month of the problem of fixing the issue with Meta, the proprietor of Instagram, describing that have as “virtually traumatising”.

In June final yr, workers at hospitals in London instructed of how they have been left grappling with the aftermath of a cyber assault that led to many hours of additional work for his or her workers.

A important incident was declared after the ransomware assault focused the companies supplied by pathology agency Synnovis.

Companies together with blood transfusions have been severely disrupted at Man’s and St Thomas’ Hospital and King’s Faculty Hospital (KCH).

Dr Anneliese Rigby, a marketing consultant anaesthetist at KCH, told the BBC at the time: “So what the labs are having to do is obtain the blood pattern, manually course of that, which is a protracted, time-consuming course of requiring quite a lot of workers which we do not have so we’re having to get further folks to assist with that.”

It appears seemingly there’ll nonetheless be many tough days forward for M&S.

Further reporting by Zoe Kleinman, Chris Vallance, Joe Tidy and Tom Gerken