Black Basta Cyber Attack Hits Capita

Russian-speaking hacking group 'Black Basta' has recently been in the news due to a giant cyber attack on the UK-based corporation Capita, known for outsourcing business processes and professional services. Capita has huge contracts with critical national infrastructure organisations in the UK. Such as National Health Service (NHS), the UK military, and the Department for Work and Pensions, in addition to large British-based companies such as Vodafone, The Royal Bank of Scotland and O2.

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What Happened?

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The extortion group Black Basta who have taken responsibility for the attack. The group are reportedly selling Capita's sensitive stolen information such as bank account information, addresses, and passport photos. Capita has recently released a statement regarding the attack claiming that "Our IT security monitoring capabilities swiftly alerted us to the incident, and we quickly invoked our established and practised technical crisis management protocols. Immediate 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.". The company also mentioned that they are collaborating with cyber security professionals from the Microsofts Incident Response team. The Sunday Times recently claimed that the following attack was much more devastating than what Capita has stated, and have started to fear that personal and corporate information was accessed by Black Basta. According to Capita, only 4% of their IT systems were affected by the incident. However, Capita has admitted that data had been stolen from their systems, although there is no report of what has been stolen.

The cyber attack caused major outrages among clients of Capita, which included agencies that are involved in critical national infrastructure. A handful of Capita clients even reported that had to use neglected working techniques such as using radios, pens and paper due to the attack. Other users were unable to access emails, Teams virtual meetings, Word and Excel; Making it challenging for employees to complete their work in an efficient manner.

Conclusion

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In conclusion, this attack sparked concern among Capita clients, as well as blowing huge damage to their reputation and future income. These attacks highlight the growing concern that Russia poses to enemy countries such as the UK, America and Ukraine and the power of Russia's online hacking forces. It is key that organisations stay vigilant to these forms of attacks and proactively protect their online network, systems and data from these sorts of online threats.

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