By Louis van Boxel-Woolf
Outsourcing giant Capita confirmed today that a cyberattack was to blame for a major IT outage on Friday.
Capita said the IT failure primarily affected “access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications”.
“The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised”, it added.
Capita, which has public sector contracts worth £6.5 billion according to The Guardian, has not said exactly which clients were affected by the outage.
Toby Lewis, global head of threat analysis at Darktrace, a cybersecurity company, told City A.M. that Capita had likely suffered an attempted ransomware attack.
“Whenever you talk about an incident involving Microsoft 365, 99.9999 per cent of the time it will be related to accounts becoming compromised. Unfortunately, in far, far too many cases, we see ransomware being the end stage of that”, he said.
Investors appeared unworried by the incident, with Capita shares trading level with their open at lunchtime.
The latest breach comes a year after the Ministry of Defence confirmed that hackers had broken into the Capita-run British Army Defence Recruitment System, accessing the personal data of those applying to join.
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