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CNBC AI News, July 23rd – A cybersecurity lapse with devastating consequences: Knights of Old (KNP), a 158-year-old British transportation firm, has been forced to shut down operations following a ransomware attack, resulting in the loss of approximately 700 jobs. The breach originated from a shockingly simple vulnerability – a weak password used by an employee.
According to reports, hackers successfully infiltrated KNP’s network by cracking the employee’s easily guessable password. This allowed them to encrypt and lock down the company’s critical operational data.
The attackers then demanded a ransom payment in exchange for decrypting the data. Their message read, in part, “If you are seeing this message, it means that your company’s internal infrastructure has been partially or completely paralyzed… Let’s leave the tears and resentments to ourselves and try to have a meaningful conversation.”
The ransom demand, reportedly £5 million (approximately $6.2 million USD), proved to be an insurmountable hurdle for KNP, exceeding the company’s financial capabilities.
KNP had purchased cyberattack insurance, and Solace Global, their insurer, dispatched a “cyber crisis” team to assess the damage. The grim assessment revealed a “worst-case scenario”: all of KNP’s data had been encrypted, servers, backups, and disaster recovery systems were compromised, and all endpoint devices were breached.
A representative from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) stated that they are working to make the UK one of the safest places to conduct online activity. However, ransomware attacks, which directly extort money from victims, are a growing and pervasive threat.
Studies indicate that the average ransomware demand faced by UK companies hovers around £4 million (approximately $5 million USD), suggesting that the demand placed on KNP was not an outlier in the current threat landscape.
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Original article, Author: Tobias. If you wish to reprint this article, please indicate the source:https://aicnbc.com/5432.html
