If you live in Britain you would have heard of the recent cyber attack against that middle class icon, Marks and Spencer.
M&S had to suspend online orders and stock control, basically everything essential to running a business. Staff even had to (reportedly) take fridge temperatures by hand because they couldn't trust the online systems. M and S is still recovering from what appears to have been one of the most comprehensive system-down attacks of modern times.
The attack was assigned to just one group called "Scattered Spider," and all we know about this group is that it is a loose association of English-speaking hackers. Little is known about the identity of this group, they present as teenagers, but that may just be part of the ruse.
The Co-op was also recently attacked by the same group, they were apparently miffed that they had the sense to pull the plug on their systems before they could do any real damage, the mistake M and S made was to wait longer allowing the hackers to infect their systems at a deeper level.
A trend, not an isolated case!
This isn’t an isolated case. According to the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, over 75% of large businesses experienced a cyberattack in the past year. The estimated cost to the UK economy exceeds £21 billion annually. The M and S incident is just the tip of the iceberg, most of these cases go unnoticed.
Such incidents remind us how totally dependent we are on cyber systems.
We need to become more resilient!
Personally I'm now gonna stack a little more cash than I used to, just in case we have a cash-only scenario for a few days. It's also a case for prepping in case cyber systems going down affect global supply chains.
I guess for businesses this is even more serious: they need to make sure they've got paper back ups of everything and make sure staff are trained to deal with customers OFFLINE for down-periods. Could be a scary prospect for Gen Z...?
While M and S is only one company, it is a reminder that hackers are growing ever more capable and more systemic system-down scenario is a distinct possibility, and maybe just for the lolz!