BBC News, Northamptonshire

The director of a 160-year-old haulage company put into chapter 11 through a cyber-attack has prompt corporations to be on their guard.
Paul Abbott was once at the board at Knights of Old, based totally in Kettering in Northamptonshire, which went into management in 2023 after vital monetary information was once corrupted.
He mentioned: “We felt we were in a very good place in terms of our security, our protocols, the measures we’d gone to to protect the business.”
Marks & Spencer (M&S) and the Co-op have skilled critical disruption lately after being centered through hackers, and a cyber-security professional in Bedfordshire warned it would occur to any person.

A ransom word from a hacker crew was once discovered buried in IT techniques at Knights of Old.
Despite efforts to handle operations manually, the assault broken key information, making it unimaginable to satisfy reporting cut-off dates set through lenders.
And so the corporate, which opened in 1865 and was once using 730 other folks through 2023, was once pressured into management.
Mr Abbott prompt bosses to test their IT techniques: “There are hundreds of businesses being compromised. The issue is the reputational damage.
“Whatever you assume you could have accomplished, significantly get it checked through professionals. People do not assume it will occur to them.”

Cyber-security expert Tash Buckley from Cranfield University in Bedfordshire said smaller firms were at particular risk.
“It truly can occur to any person. For better corporations, the good factor is you have already got a few of the ones processes, the ones procedures, you could have skilled your team of workers, you come up with the money for to get professionals in to mend the incident as it is happening.
“For smaller companies, it’s more of an existential issue. They don’t have the kind of finances that M&S have to get the experts in.”
Ms Buckley additionally highlighted the evolving nature of ransomware threats, caution of the upward thrust of “ransomware as a service” fashions that mix information robbery with gadget encryption, expanding the drive on sufferers to pay ransoms.
M&S has reported its cyber assault to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
An NCSC spokesperson mentioned: “The NCSC routinely engages with a whole range of organisations about the cyber-threats that the UK faces and regularly reminds them about the steps they can take to be as resilient as possible.”