Kevin BeaumontIt's a month since Russian hackers first got into #Capita, on March 22nd.
Black Basta also list Capita as CAPITA_2, just noticed - two listings.
Really interesting piece in The Times, where Capita claim that they informed clients they were hacked at 11am on Friday 31st March (the first day) and kept them briefed.
Anybody agree or disagree this was true? https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/silence-is-deafening-after-cyberattack-on-capita-dgns935gz
Silence is deafening after cyberattack on Capita
Error messages flashed up as staff at Capita tried to log into their accounts on Friday, March 31. Frustrated workers were advised not to submit password reset requests to swamped technology teams as the outsourcer got to grips with what was going on. In a preliminary statement that morning, dictat
BBC report on the Pension Regulator concerns about the data breach at #Capita.
Capita administer pensions for around 4 million people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65443841
The FT also have a story on it, where Capita refuse to confirm or deny the Black Basta thing. Super crazy as they definitely know what happened. https://www.ft.com/content/c4383788-e27b-48ea-bd72-044c01841926
#Capita were still listed unindexed on Black Basta's portal, so I entered a chat and asked Black Basta if they hacked Capita.
Black Basta erased the chat history, and removed CAPITA and CAPITA_2 from their portal just now. Previously, Capita declined to comment about communicating with Black Basta to @BleepingComputer
The Financial Conduct Authority has written to Capita’s customers, reminding them of their responsibilities when it comes to data breach at Capita. https://www.ft.com/content/9a6c1e80-6302-4749-8841-3c5971d5d1cd
Financial Times reports that pension data has been exfiltrated from Capita’s customers, and that the ICO says they have received “other breach reports believed to be in connection with the Capita incident” from Capita’s customers. https://www.ft.com/content/baa794ff-90dc-4d6c-a930-64dae7391940
The Sunday Times newspaper has a big feature about ransomware today, featuring me, @ciaranmartin, @brett
I just want to call out this bit about Capita and say their failure to acknowledge the fact they lost security vetting data impacts real people, at a scale way bigger than one person - I think it is ethically poor that Capita just deny stuff that matters.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-hackers-are-recruiting-on-the-dark-web-mpl2hvsss
#Capita have issued a market update and confirmed data exfiltration. They wordsmith it to be data exfil from 0.1% of their server estate, rather than data volume or what was taken. They also use the cyberattack update to boast revenue wins.
However, the company could use the cyber attack to its advantage, he added.
“If Capita is smart it’ll come out of this saying we’ve more experience of handling this than anybody else, you should be using us, because we know what we’re doing and we employ leading experts in this field,” Rawlinson said.
Lmao, that’s one take.
https://www.ft.com/content/20aa4844-2ebe-44dc-9550-7d950150e784
Friday evening news drop: USS lecturers’ pension fund may have had their personal details stolen during the recent cyberattack on the outsourcing firm #Capita. https://www.uss.co.uk/news-and-views/latest-news/2023/05/05122023_important-information-about-capitas-cyber-incident
Important information about Capita’s cyber incident
Capita recently reported a cyber incident involving hackers targeting some of its computer servers – potentially impacting several of the cross-sector businesses it serves. We use Capita’s technology platform (Hartlink) to support our in-house pension administration processes and have been liaising closely with the company over the course of its forensic investigations.
By ‘may have been exfiltrated’ in that scenario, Capita mean ‘the attacker definitely rcloned the entire server to a VPS provider’, just FYI to pension companies.
The Telegraph reporting that, aside from USS, around 350 other pension providers are impacted by hack of Capita, with millions of pension holders requiring notification - they call it the largest hack in British history. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/12/capita-hackers-steal-personal-data-350-funds-hack/
One month ago Capita’s CEO claimed their response to the attack would “go down as a case history for how to deal with a sophisticated cyber attack” - while denying any data exfiltration, and blaming the incident on a single staff member clicking a link (that bit was behind a Times paywall).
I suspect Capita’s board should be asking if somebody opening a file is the real cause of the issue - or if it’s a cascading failure to manage properly and transparently from the top down.
USS have today started notifying just under half a million people that #Capita lost their data to Black Basta. USS didn’t include nation insurance numbers taken.. which enables fraud.
Due to legal requirements in the UK, every pension holder in every impacted pension scheme will need to be notified individually - according to media reports, this is up to 350 pension schemes. So this may become the biggest data breach disclosure ever in the UK.
I haven’t pressed publish on this yet, partly as I want to see what Capita disclose. It’s not just pensions.
Colchester City Council has been informed they have a data breach by #Capita. Capita are telling them the data has now been “secured”. Colchester City Council say they have “extreme disappointment with Capita”. https://www.colchester.gov.uk/info/cbc-article/?id=KA-04376
Update: it turns out this was related to the S3 bucket incident.
Interesting detail in the Colchester piece about #Capita - as far as I know, no other local authorities have yet told the ICO, which they are supposed to do within 72 hours.
Btw, if anybody wonders if I’m human and feel sorry for the Capita cybersecurity staff dealing with this - absolutely. I feel awful for them. I’ve always said the technical containment and investigation sounds good.
I suspect there have been people there tearing their hair out. I doubt the decisions to pretend leaked data was public domain, not admit ransomware, say 0.1% of server estate etc came from the immediate responding teams.
Diageo pension fund says their data has been compromised in #Capita breach.
“During the course of April, Capita informed us that they had taken steps to isolate and contain the incident whilst they continued to investigate it. However, on 3 May, Capita told us that it is likely a file containing your data had been compromised.”
The Financial Times reports #Capita are saying it will take them through to the end of May to notify pension funds about breached data - over 2 months since the hack began. https://www.ft.com/content/39b71f11-6628-476f-9876-59697be25fb9
More from FT on the #Capita Black Basta ransomware fall out, questions how much insurance will cover. https://www.ft.com/content/ff150b65-8dc6-48c8-b2e4-6b8fbee4ea03
Lots of new details in Times piece about the cybersecurity woes engulfing Capita. Features my Mastodon thread about the files on #Capita’s own website.
New victims include staff at PWC, Unilever and The Cabinet Office. 11 councils are also investigating the open bucket issue.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0513205a-f718-11ed-a712-8f47f8e830cf?shareToken=e595f233220e2a4532500771d0175ea9
Non-paywall version if you hit it: https://archive.ph/2023.05.20-234130/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/capita-under-fire-after-confidential-files-published-online-7cjh2jj59
UK’s largest pension insurer, Rothesay, has been caught in #Capita breach https://www.rothesay.com/news/newsroom/statement-on-capita-s-cyber-incident/
If you’re wondering why specifically pension companies are disclosing, the Pension Regulator has reminded both them and Capita that there are clear and enforceable legal obligations for pensions.
The #Capita breach involves other data, including UK gov data, which has not been disclosed.
USS customer notification about Capita breach is categorical that pension data was exfiltrated - previous language was around data potentially being accessed https://infosec.exchange/@spzb/110414033883093993
Simon Briggs (@[email protected])
Attached: 2 images Email just received from #USS about #Capita data breach. Fyi @[email protected]
USS pension update is on their website now. Pension data was definitely stolen via #Capita. https://www.uss.co.uk/news-and-views/latest-news/2023/05/05252023_important-update-on-capitas-cyber-incident
The ICO issued an update on #Capita just now, acknowledging the ransomware incident and the open bucket incident.
The BBC report nearly a hundred companies have contacted the ICO so far about #Capita. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65746518
What Security Watchdog (owned by #Capita - they're currently mid sale to another company) do. I may have added the final line.
NHS England say they had data breach via #Capita of medical records of two active patients and two deceased patients https://www.england.nhs.uk/2023/06/nhs-england-statement-on-capita-cyber-incident/
Several months later, #Capita have told teachers in Sheffield they may have had a “potential” data breach. https://www.thestar.co.uk/taxonomy/term/2438/taxonomy/term/164/warning-as-sheffield-schools-hit-by-data-leak-after-hackers-target-capita-4177037
Long time readers of this very thread may remember I pointed out the Sheffield teacher breach over 2 months ago. https://doublepulsar.com/black-basta-ransomware-group-extorts-capita-with-stolen-customer-data-capita-fumble-response-9c3ca6c3b283
Legal proceedings initiated against Capita over data breach. https://www.professionalpensions.com/news/4117931/legal-proceedings-initiated-capita-breach
Miners Pension Fund members have data stolen in #Capita hack - members informed almost 3 months later. https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/23605752.miners-pension-fund-members-data-stolen-capital-hack/
Remember the #Capita Black Basta ransomware incident from March? It’s still playing out months later - one of the orgs say “We remain concerned at the level of information provided to USS by Capita”
https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/13020/Update-on-USS-Capita-data-breach
Four months in, Capita have finally admitted to its own staff that their data was taken.
Auditors PWC are amongst the many other victims. They say Capita have been unable to provide “final, complete and accurate” information.
In other news, Capita and PWC have just won the contract to provide the UK’s cyber incident reporting platform. https://www.ft.com/content/52130b83-6ad7-474c-aaf7-88a549dc85e3
The Times reports #Capita staff saying Capita “played down” the ransomware/extortion during internal meetings and reported that executives said that “attacks happened to all organisations” and “it is just a small breach”. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/capita-admits-hackers-also-stole-staffs-personal-details-jjkw3r7rs
Capita’s CEO has announced he is retiring. Capita say he had stayed on to deal with the ransomware/extortion incident.
The Times ran the headline “Capita boss heads for exit with turnaround finished” attached to a puff piece, so I just checked on how #Capita are doing. Good that the turnaround is finished. A story in 4 pictures.
In #Capita’s financial results they say “minimal impact from cyber incident”, in a call with investors they described it as a non-event.
Good luck to Capita’s clients. 🫡
Capita's share price is down 18% today. Or as Capita call it, 0.1% effected by a Happy Little Non-Event.
Just over 2000 people are taking legal action against #Capita, including some of its own employees.
Note this report contains factual inaccuracies as it relies on Capita’s version of events.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/13/capita_class_action_2000_claimants/
30k school pupil records were exfiltrated as part of the Capita hack, but the Department of Education doesn’t appear to have told parents. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/hackers-steal-pupils-details-from-capita/
4000% increase in pension scheme breaches reported to the ICO in the UK this year.
Capita never disclosed the number of pension schemes impacted their end but I’ve heard it was… a lot.
https://www.pensionsage.com/pa/UK-pension-schemes-record-4000-pc-rise-in-cyber-security-breaches.php
Just over 5k people are suing Capita at the High Court over their ransomware data breach. Discovery on this one should be incredible.
Capita are saying, regarding their court case, that there is no evidence that data stolen was publicly available. They may want to tell the people who were directly impacted. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-hackers-are-recruiting-on-the-dark-web-mpl2hvsss
It’s been almost a year since the #Capita ransomware incident began. Here’s how the new CEO describes it in their yearly update.
There’s now some careful rewording around data exfiltration and “recovery activities” of said data.
The exact amount they book for incident response and recovery is £25.3m, and they do not mention if insurance will cover. Overall the business has booked a £106.6m loss for the year.
#Capita cut the pension business out of their operational KPIs, citing the impact of the ransomware incident.
#Capita’s new CEO has refused to say if they paid Black Basta ransomware group last year (they did). https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/capita-in-the-red-as-more-cuts-announced-mrs9gkx97
This thread is almost 1000 days old and getting a resurrection. #Capita have been fined £14m by the ICO over their ransomware incident.
Lots of big details in the fine, including over 1tb of data stolen (as detailed in this Mastodon thread at the time), confirmation of Qakbot and my blog etc.
Their SOC was wildly understaffed. It took attacker 4 hours to get domain admin due to poor security practices. Lots of learnings for large orgs.
Capita had the PII of 6 million people exfiltrated.. but aren’t exactly sure how many still.
Additionally, they already had a major security incident running and external IR in before the encryption - while this incident was running, the attacker stole a terabyte of data over several days. The cause? No containment. They didn’t contain when they knew the attacker was on the network.
Here’s the data stolen. This included my data, as I had used their employee vetting scheme at the time (for a different company). #Capita
Capita says their systems had Nessus vulnerability scans. The ICO notes this is not a silver bullet, and that recurring penetration tests should take place. It found the business unit with exfiltrated data never had a pen test. #Capita
Capita had written down that it responds to all P2 alerts in its SOC with 45 minutes. It actually took them several days to reach the initial alert. They were never reaching their internal SLA.
They argued with the ICO that it is not able to regulate its internal SLAs and its regulatory overreach.. the ICO took a different view.
I wrote up my thoughts on what orgs can learn from the Capita ICO fine for their ransomware incident:
Tobes@GossiTheDog thanks for the write up - really helpful as a case study / evidence.
Oriel Jutty 
@GossiTheDog OK, but do I really have to penetrate my test systems?
MJ Ray@GossiTheDog surely it is a case history, but of how not to handle an attack.
lj·rk@GossiTheDog Wow, these are bog standard tools, nothing sophisticated at all. Not surprising really but still.
Cees de Groot@GossiTheDog "stop drinking the zero trust Kool-Aid" - I mean, I think it is an excellent security practice to _start_ with zero trust. I guess that "Kool-Aid" levels of zero trust means that you end there as well, which I've seen and is not a good idea :-)
Mathew J. Schwartz
Interpipes 💙@GossiTheDog meanwhile, here we are having a human review *every* case we receive within 30 minutes. I guess it takes billions of pounds of taxpayer money, shareholder value and innovation to decide SLAs don’t matter, or something
tautology@GossiTheDog the number of places I've been to which run Nessus on a regular basis and then never actually fix anything is insane. I spent two years working at another large IT company. Every month I ran a Nessus scan and issued a report to management. That report was pretty much the same every month.
JaxxAI@GossiTheDog I know I'm telling my gran how to suck eggs here but Nessus cloud is really cool. In my old job we had it scanning all ingress points daily and overnight, including the websites, firewalls, everything facing the Internet etc. Was cool, nice reports too. Made sure it passed every scan and if anything popped up, we addressed it. Internal scans were more like bi-annual but did happen on schedule.
Biggles 20X6!@GossiTheDog er. That's a *lot*.
Iirc CVV/CVCs are not to be stored by anyone except card issuer once the transaction is done, so that's possibly also going to be headache land for them
https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/faq-can-cvc-be-stored-for-card-on-file-or-recurring-transactions
Dr. Christopher Kunz@Taco_lad @GossiTheDog Yeah, I was about to say - that seems like a blatant violation of PCI DSS. If they were a card payment processor, they will probably cease to do so.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
@GossiTheDog Oh, well at least it wasn't anything sensitive like your
• Address;
• International address;
• Email address;
• Phone number;
• Date of birth;
• Child data;
• National Insurance (“NI”) number;
• Driver's licence / driver's licence scan;
• Passport number / passport scan;
• Photo ID scan;
• Other national ID / numbers;
• Bank account numbers and sort codes;
• Personal International Bank Account Number ("IBAN");
• Credit card number / credit card scan;
• Debit card number and CVV / debit card scan;
• Biometrics;
• Employee login details;
• Copies of signatures.
• Health information;
• Medical numbers;
• Racial/ethnic origin;
• Political beliefs;
• Religious/philosophical beliefs;
• Trade union membership;
• Sexual orientation;
• Criminal records ("CRB") checks.
Kevin Karhan 
@GossiTheDog @catsalad most of these data are illegal to even collect, request or store to begin with!
Wanja@GossiTheDog I fucking hate these modern "KYC" (Know Your Customer) setups. They collect every possible piece of data about you, for what? It's not like law enforcement needs more than 1 of these to track you down. In all likelihood, the only thing this does is decrease the premiums on their fraud insurance.
Which is ironic, because if they have any *cyber* insurance, those premiums are now going to be WAY up!
Moritz Dietz@GossiTheDog this is absolute madness
Deejacker@GossiTheDog My data as well as I was an employee of their's for a number of years. I have been following your comments about this closely and will be reading your article you promoted earlier today. Thanks for all the information you have been highlighting.
Tom Dewar@GossiTheDog Capita used to run the Public Sector Recruitment (PSR) for the UK Gov (framework for hiring contractors). Admittedly quite a while ago now. Don’t suppose you know whether this breach touches that?
@GossiTheDog £14m is grossly insufficient as capita will consider that cheaper, as a cost of doing business, than doing things properly.
Gary 
@interpipes @GossiTheDog it’s pocket change to a company like that, isn’t it?
David Sullivan@WiteWulf @interpipes @GossiTheDog Maybe, but ... https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/112047920176704549
@WiteWulf @sully @GossiTheDog not sure some market consequences to their share price are a good basis to constrain penalties for terrible behaviour, tbh, because if that was sufficient, these firms would already be behaving better, and
how much of that price shock to the share price was the expectation of an actually meaningful penalty being served upon them?
Floating Onion@interpipes @WiteWulf @sully @GossiTheDog Sure, took a hit when the news came out and a couple of months later shot back up. Then did a bit of a to-yo.
Zack Whittaker@GossiTheDog bizarre to me that the reporter didn't cite the ransomware payment as something to ask the CEO on the record if they dispute. you can't dispute something that happened.
I love this, so I@GossiTheDog let’s see what happens in a couple of days. Good start that The Line is starting to notice atrocious IT security
@GossiTheDog I scrolled up in this thread and it's not even the first time Capita's stock has been down 18% in a day...
Kevin Beaumont (@[email protected])
Capita's share price is down 18% today. Or as Capita call it, 0.1% effected by a Happy Little Non-Event.
@GossiTheDog Unfortunately the investors are probably quite used to this type of dive, certainly tanked several times since I worked there.
Jez Caudle 
@GossiTheDog Crapita - what Private Eye call it. To the point that I know read it as that.
╰•★★PuertoRicanMami ★★•╯
piofthings@GossiTheDog they were not only exfiltrated, data was destroyed and not recovered properly. I had an account in my council site. It no longer works, it doesn’t send me password reset emails and it refuses to sign me or my wife up again! Capita are as incompetent as they come!
Cali@GossiTheDog I found out this week that if you click reader mode on paywalled articles = no paywall
Gary Parker@GossiTheDog “contains factual inaccuracies as it relies on Capita’s version of events”
@GossiTheDog Their offer of a year's 'Free' access to Experian credit monitoring for those affected does not feel like an adequate response to anyone who has looked up Experian's history of data breaches.
Alan Miller 
🇺🇦@GossiTheDog to be fair, that drop is small potatoes if it's only 17% of what's left after their previous 80% decline.
Steve Scott@GossiTheDog Means the fines aren't big enough.
@GossiTheDog Or perhaps a better way of putting it is "We've managed to socialise the costs of the resulting identify theft which are a direct result of our negligence, and therefore there minimal financial impact to our results"