Big British High Street Retailer Attacked

Uploaded on 2023-03-03 in TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, FREE TO VIEW

Leading British high Street retailer WH Smith has announced that it has been attacked and that the hackers have accessed current and former members of staff’s data including names, addresses, National Insurance numbers and birth dates.

The books and stationery chain have not say how many of its current and former employees had been affected by the breach, which took place earlier this week.

The retailer published an alert issued to the London Stock Exchange on 2 March, telling investors of this cyber security attack.

The company employs about 10,000 people in the UK across its High Street stores and outlets at railway stations and airports. An investigation has been launched into the attack with support from third-party cyber security experts.

Relevant authorities have been informed per the company's incident response plan. “WH Smith takes the issue of cyber security extremely seriously and investigations into the incident are ongoing,” the company said in its statement. “We are notifying all affected colleagues and have put measures in place to support them... There has been no impact on the trading activities of the group. Our website, customer accounts and underlying customer databases are on separate systems that are unaffected by this incident,” it said.

Highlighting the importance of authenticating identities, Jasson Casey, CTO at Beyond Identity commented. "Hackers no longer break in using sophisticated techniques. They simply log in. Eighty percent of data breaches start with a password-based attack. While MFA was supposed to fix this issue, first generation MFA that uses one time code, magic links or push notifications are now easily bypassed." Casey recommends that organistaions transition to modern passwordless, and phishing resistant Multifactor Authentication (MFA) technoques to keep customer accounts and internal systems secure.

WH Smith said it has notified the Information Commissioner’s Office and relevant authorities about the latest hack. Similar attacks are a growing problem for UK businesses, with a number of high profile hacks - in January, Royal Mail was hit by a cyber incident which caused “severe service disruption” to international exports for almost six weeks.

Also commenting, Keiron Holyome, VP UKI & Emerging Markets at BlackBerry said “This attack on WH Smith underscores that the global cyber risk equally applies to British retailers. Organisations need better cyber hygiene as criminals are increasingly being attracted by stores of sensitive data and information... Even after recent high-profile hacks, like that on Royal Mail, it is highly worrying that vulnerabilities still plague giant companies like WH Smith."

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