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.

Serious data breach sparks council probe

Council expresses its extreme disappointment with its financial services contractor, Capita

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.”

https://www.scotsman.com/news/crime/diageo-pension-fund-members-caught-up-in-russia-linked-capita-cyberattack-4143864

Diageo pension fund members caught up in Russia-linked Capita cyberattack

Outsourcing giant says it has taken ‘extensive’ steps to recover and secure data

The Scotsman
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
Capita hit by new data breach incident

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Financial Times
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
M&S and Diageo pension plans hit by Capita cyber attack

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Financial Times

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

Capita under fire after ‘confidential’ files published online

Cybersecurity is a priority for Capita, the UK’s largest outsourcing company. Just look at its guide for staff, which gives tips on how to keep their IT systems

The Sunday Times
UK’s largest pension insurer, Rothesay, has been caught in #Capita breach https://www.rothesay.com/news/newsroom/statement-on-capita-s-cyber-incident/
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]

Infosec Exchange
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
Important update on Capita's 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
Capita hack: 90 organisations report data breaches to watchdog

The privacy watchdog is urging groups using the outsourcing giant to check if data has been exposed.

BBC News
What Security Watchdog (owned by #Capita - they're currently mid sale to another company) do. I may have added the final line.
#Capita have sold Security Watchdog to #Matrix.
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/
NHS England » 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

Warning as Sheffield schools hit by data leak after hackers target Capita

Schools across Sheffield have been affected by a data breach as a result of hackers.

The Star
Legal proceedings initiated against Capita over data breach. https://www.professionalpensions.com/news/4117931/legal-proceedings-initiated-capita-breach
Legal proceedings initiated against Capita over data breach

Law firm Barings Law has initiated legal proceedings against Capita, following the cyber incident earlier this year.

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/
Miners Pension Fund members have data stolen in Capital hack

Thousands of miners have had their personal details stolen in a cyber attack on their pension fund – but only found out more than two months after…

The Northern Echo

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

Update on USS Capita data breach

An update on the work being undertaken following the announcement by USS on 11 May 2023 that the HartLink system used by Capita to run pensions administration on behalf of USS, was hacked in March 2023.

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

Capita’s own pension scheme suffered data breach in March hack

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Financial Times
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 admits hackers also stole staff’s personal details

Capita has told some of its own employees that their national insurance numbers, addresses and pension details are among data stolen by Russian hackers, more th

The Times
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/

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

Pensioners, employees and medical pros among those aiming to be compensated for data exposure

The Register
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/
30k primary pupils' details at risk in Capita data breach

Dark web monitored for the information after the company was targeted in March

Schools Week

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

Thousands of pension holders to sue Capita over ‘Russia-linked’ hack

Outsourcer’s shares have fallen almost 50pc since last year’s cyber attack

The Telegraph
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
How hackers are recruiting on the dark web

While other tech giants have spent the past year shedding jobs, one international software group has been recruiting enthusiastically. On a murky part of the in

The Sunday Times

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.
Investors react. #Capita
#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
Capita in the red as more cuts announced

The outsourcer published a pre-tax loss of £106.6 million in 2023 compared with a profit of £61.4 million in 2022

The Times

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.

#Capita

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.

#Capita

I wrote up my thoughts on what orgs can learn from the Capita ICO fine for their ransomware incident:

https://doublepulsar.com/what-organisations-can-learn-from-the-record-breaking-fine-over-capitas-ransomware-incident-6afbdfcdd35b

@GossiTheDog thanks for the write up - really helpful as a case study / evidence.
@GossiTheDog OK, but do I really have to penetrate my test systems?
@GossiTheDog surely it is a case history, but of how not to handle an attack.
@GossiTheDog Wow, these are bog standard tools, nothing sophisticated at all. Not surprising really but still.
@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 :-)
@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
@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.
@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.