To be concerned at our absolute sheer vulnerability to cyberattacks

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-14710507/Co-op-stock-shelves-recovers-crippling-cyber-hack.html?ico=mol_desktop_home-newtab&molReferrerUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fhome%2Findex.html

Coop stock levels to start recovering this weekend apparently.

I work in a Co Op. I know deliveries to shops in places that are isolated with only a Co Op (Scottish islands etc) are being prioritised, so anything that can go out is going there first. So we are getting very small random deliveries, so two cages of goods rather than 30. Locals are being very understanding, but it's a 30 mile trip to the nearest other supermarket of any size, so I feel their patience may be waning, and there's nothing we can do!

I think ALL systems might be tightened up as a result, but if hackers want in, they will get in, particularly if there's money to be made.

I would definitely recommend some kind of gap/efficacy analysis to understand whether your cyber budget is being used appropriately.

I manage a relatively small business in the scheme of things. We have had a number of attempted attacks including yesterday.

I have a meeting with our directors at the end of the month. I know at that meeting I will be asked why our Cyber Security expenses are so high and will have to justified it.

One of the problems is not just over-reliance on ICT, but on ICT staff, whose instinct is to "make the ICT better". You need offline back up processes that are practiced and ready to go.

I had to point out to our company after Crowdstrike that we didn't have a printed copy of our disaster response plans.

Bit of a digression here but...

If you want to be even more terrified and enjoy reading fiction, anything by Marc Elsberg.
Each book tackles a different way that modern civilization is disastrously vulnerable to attack and break down. For example, Black Out, what happens if malicious parties hack the power grids. Like what may have happened in Spain and the UK recently.
Really good reads and it is interesting to think about how vulnerable modern society is.

I was dating someone for a while who worked for a global software company, in a department that dealt with the internal IT. As a test they sent everyone in the company an email from an unknown address, containing a link. About 80% of employees clicked on the link 🤦‍♀️.

Oh and for anyone interested, around 90% of cyber incidents are caused by human error. So that really basic and annoying annual training you do at work is actually really important because honestly if the company is going to be hacked it’s highly likely that it will be because:

a) someone clicked on a link and entered their login details
b) someone let the person behind tailgate into the building
c) someone didn’t do all the checks when resetting a password over the IT phoneline
d) someone picked Password123 as their password then wrote it down and stuck it under their keyboard.

i work in cybersecurity and the biggest problem is that we are seen as a cost to the business. Everything we are doing is to prevent a risk from happening so our success is shown by us not being hacked, not having data stolen. Unfortunately that can look to budget holders like they are paying a lot of money to protect against something that isn’t happening, so we are always on the hit list for budget freezes and cuts.

The NHS board I work for had a massive cyber attack a year ago, lots of patient information was gained, the system we use in the community for our iPads was hacked etc and we haven’t been given it back yet and we need it really to enable us to complete notes out and about, my thought was if we were still using paper and pen notes it would never have happened on the scale it did

Then you’re accepting an increasingly divided society with a few rich elite ever more closely wired into the Borg and some families struggling to get homework completed with one mobile phone to the family.

We can’t afford this level of IT on any level.

Clearly we’re in a revolution and the climate issues may well push that into a collapse. God knows what the survivors will think when sense returns. They’re as likely to be a religious society that rejects machines, or at least thinking machines, entirely.

I'm 20 years on from this, but thank you. It is a thankless job, like so many. It only takes one out of 100s of thousands to be a major issue and then the blame game starts. Pleased I no longer have this as my headache.

I'm more bothered about an attack on the electrical grid. Now that will stop the country.

But there's no telling people.

Our little suburban coop had a delivery, yesterday, which included 5 big cartons of sausage and mash ready meals. They've marked them all down to a quid in the hope of shifting them.

Yesterday I was in the office (central London) and all our Microsoft programs seemed to be up the spout all day, when I went to Tesco for my lunchtime meal deal the tills weren’t accepting contactless, and then on the way home most of the tube lines were down due to a power failure. I did wonder if it was a cyber attack but maybe all coincidence. It does seem to be happening more frequently though

Yep our coop (north Scotland) also just about wiped out of anything fresh/fridge/freezer. They still have some stock of dry and tinned goods and household things like toilet rolls and cat food but it’s going down quite quickly. The shop staff know nothing and are obviously sick of getting questions about it.

I suspect that Tesco takes its cybersecurity seriously.

I really think we need a rethink about our levels of reliance on IT given its vulnerability. It’s costing us a fortune and I’m not convinced it’s worth the cost. Millions out of work, constant updates and security needed, huge amounts of power requiring environmental damage and impacts when it goes wrong. It’s not free and it’s not working class people gaining.

Agree Op.

Critical National Infrastructure:

Trains, planes, water, electricity etc.

Don't be fooled into thinking it's just script kiddies, there's state-sponsored threat actors, hackers for hire, ransomware as a service etc.

The good thing is that basic Cyber Hygiene will prevent most attacks.

The M&S attack was a social engineering attack to begin with. The malicious actors called up their IT helpdesk to get some login credentials reset and they did it. This was their way in. From there, it was get remote access, install malware and let it spread whilst simultaneously exfiltrating data for ransom (no doubt)

And this is why we shouldn't sleepwalk into becoming a cashless, app-centric society.

What about the police going after the criminals behind these attacks? We seem woefully unprepared on this front in my opinion.
Also the government itself invests fuck all in cyber security itself. Look at how much they pay for info sec and security roles in the public sector.
I think it’s easy to scapegoat firms for not investing enough, but the reality is there are always ways in and firms are just trying to keep pace with the vulnerabilities and fix them. If there’s no deterrent for committing these crimes, then you just get more and more people having a go because there’s way to make money out of hacking firms.

I work in Cybersecurity.

I have access to up to date threat intelligence. If you're this worried about three attacks on retail, then you're in for a really rough ride if you start opening this can of worms.

I currently have 152,000 cyber attacks live in my threat intel platform, globally, since the 29th April.

The big thing to worry about isn't a shop, it's the critical national infrastructure. Thankfully, they are generally very robust in terms of their cyber defences.

As previous posters have said, there's surprisingly very few attacks that are actually successful.