Financial Times

Brit­ish Air­ways, Boots and the BBC were among the com­pan­ies to warn employ­ees yes­ter­day they had been affected by the breach that hit soft­ware used by Zel­lis, the UK payroll pro­vider that serves nearly half of the FTSE 100.

The BBC, which has about 20,000 work­ers, and Boots, the phar­macy retailer that employs more than 50,000, aler­ted staff to the poten­tial breach, which affected their names, dates of birth and National Insur­ance num­bers. Brit­ish Air­ways, which in 2020 was fined £20mn for leak­ing cus­tomer data, said it would “provide sup­port and advice” to rel­ev­ant staff.

The hack exploited a weak­ness in a sup­posedly secure piece of file-trans­fer soft­ware, high­light­ing the grow­ing vul­ner­ab­il­ity of many com­pan­ies to soph­ist­ic­ated cyber attacks tar­get­ing flaws along their soft­ware sup­ply chain.

Secur­ity research­ers said the hack­ers were expec­ted to use the data to launch “hack and leak” attacks, threat­en­ing to release sens­it­ive inform­a­tion unless com­pan­ies pay sub­stan­tial sums.

Perprators

“The group is Rus­sian speak­ing but this is not the Rus­sian state, this is not Rus­sia-dir­ec­ted, and pred­ates the Ukrain­ian inva­sion,” he said. “This is not Rus­sia attack­ing the west.”

Tags #Cybersecurity #large-scale-hack