05/12/2025

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

The Register

Opinion It's been a devastating few weeks for UK retail giants. Marks and Spencer, the Co-Op, and now uber-posh Harrods have had massive disruptions due to ransomware attacks taking systems down for prolonged periods.

If the goods these people sold were one-tenth as shoddy as their corporate cybersecurity, they'd have been out of business years ago. It's a wake-up call, says the UK's National Center for Stating the Obvious. And what will happen? The industry will just press the snooze button again, as we hear reports that other retailers are "patching like crazy."

The bare fact that entire sectors remain exquisitely vulnerable to what is, by now, a very familiar form of attack is a diagnostic of systematic failure in the way such sectors are run. There are few details of what exactly happened, but it's not the details that matter, it's the fact that so little was made public.