Capita, the largest outsourcing company in the UK, has confirmed that the IT outage that locked staff out of their accounts last week was caused by a “cyber incident“.
While not all 61,000 employees were affected, staff attempting to log in were told their passwords were incorrect, leading to speculation of a cyberattack. Capita has contracts with the Ministry of Defence, and a consortium it leads took over engineering and maintenance support for training simulators for the Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.
The company’s statement said that “no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised” had been found.
Capita has reported £2.8bn ($3.45bn) in total revenue, with £1.4bn ($1.7bn) of that coming from its public service division. Although the company’s share price has dropped by 3% since the incident, the statement said it had restored access to Microsoft Office 365 and was making progress restoring remaining client services. Capita did not specify which services had been disrupted.
Financially motivated ransomware attacks remain a significant threat for UK organisations. Capita provides services to the British government that may be of interest to state-sponsored espionage groups. The company’s statement confirmed that immediate steps had been taken to isolate and contain the issue, which was limited to parts of the Capita network.
Although it did not disclose the nature of the incident, the investigation is ongoing, and the company said it would update the market if there was a need to provide additional information.
