Cyber attacks against M&S and Co-op earlier this year cost anywhere between £270 million to £440m, according to analysis by the Cyber Monitoring Centre.
In April, British retailers were targeted with a series of ransomware attacks, with M&S taking down online sales and later admitting customer data was stolen. Co-op shut down aspects of its own IT system to limit disruption when it was attacked in a similar way.
Alongside those two, Harrods and other retailers were impacted by cyber incidents, but the CMC didn’t include them in its assessment due to a lack of information. The attacks are believed to be the work of “Scattered Spider” hackers.
The mooted figures include the financial impact on M&S and Co-op, as well as their partners and suppliers, taking in lost sales as well as incident response, IT restoration and legal costs.
“Although both of the targeted companies suffered business disruption, data loss, and costs for incident response and IT rebuild, business disruption drives the vast majority of the financial cost,” the CMC said in a statement.
M&S managed to return to limited online sales late last month after several weeks of disruption. According to the CMS, the financial impact of the incident amounted to around £1.3 million in losses per day.
“This is less than the total loss in turnover as it takes into account reductions in orders, stock that can be resold later, and not having to pay other variable costs,” CMC said.
Source: IT Pro