{"id":88632,"date":"2023-04-03T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=88632"},"modified":"2023-04-03T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T07:00:00","slug":"three-day-capita-outage-was-result-of-cyber-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=88632","title":{"rendered":"Three-day Capita outage was result of cyber attack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A major IT outage at outsourcer Capita<\/a> that began on Friday 31 March has been confirmed as the result of a cyber attack of a currently undisclosed nature.<\/p>\n

The incident downed some customer-facing services and, given the nature of Capita\u2019s business \u2013 the organisation has billions of pounds of public sector contracts \u2013 sparked immediate fears of a cyber attack.<\/p>\n

Among the organisations affected were several councils, including the London boroughs of Barnet and Barking and Dagenham, which were forced to suspend their call centre operations.<\/p>\n

According to internal sources<\/a>, the incident also hit some providers of critical national infrastructure (CNI), forcing staff to resort to pen and paper in some cases.<\/p>\n

In a statement<\/a>, Capita said it had indeed \u201cexperienced a cyber incident\u201d primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, though the majority of our client services remained in operation,\u201d the organisation said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur IT security monitoring capabilities swiftly alerted us to the incident, and we quickly invoked our established and practised technical crisis management protocols,\u201d it continued. \u201cImmediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue. The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

<\/i>Restoring client services<\/h3>\n

Over the weekend, Capita\u2019s IT and security teams have been working alongside specialist technical assistance to restore internal access to the affected applications, and is also making \u201cgood progress\u201d in restoring client services to full working order.<\/p>\n

Although the manner in which the incident first unfolded bears the hallmarks of a ransomware attack, there is, at the time of writing, no indication as to whether or not Capita has been affected by ransomware.<\/p>\n

Again, the nature of its business as a supplier to operators of the UK\u2019s most critical public services would make Capita a prime target for a financially-motivated or state-backed threat actor. The organisation has not made any further comment on the nature of the incident.<\/p>\n

Arctic Wolf<\/a> strategy vice-president Ian McShane said: \u201cDue to its unique position at the heart of government and public services like the NHS, and the ongoing growth of attackers using supply chains to attack at scale, it\u2019s vital that organisations with direct links to or from Capita\u2019s IT and application infrastructure take precautions to stop any potential spread.<\/p>\n

\u201cOrganisations also need to be alert to criminals taking advantage of any confusion around this,\u201d he said. \u201cAttackers always look to capitalise on fear and uncertainty through tailored social engineering attack campaigns. As such, employees should be advised to scrutinise any communications extra carefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cCompany leaders should also communicate directly with employees to ensure they understand the process for flagging suspicious emails or messages,\u201d added McShane. \u201cLikewise, IT teams should review what protections they have in place, and implement proactive monitoring for all administrative accounts, ensuring any changes made to these accounts will trigger an alert.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A major IT outage at outsourcer Capita that began on Friday 31 March has been confirmed as the result of a cyber attack of a currently undisclosed nature. The incident downed some customer-facing services and, given the nature of Capita\u2019s business \u2013 the organisation has billions of pounds of public sector contracts \u2013 sparked immediate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[533],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/88633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}