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The Star
2 days ago
- Business
- The Star
UK's M&S resumes online orders following cyber incident
A pedestrian stands outside the Marble Arch branch of British retailer Marks & Spencer Plc in central London, Britain, May 18, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
The Star
21-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
M&S says cyber hackers broke in through third-party contractor
Pedestrians walk past the Marble Arch branch of British retailer Marks & Spencer Plc in central London, Britain, May 18, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso/File Photo LONDON (Reuters) -Marks & Spencer said hackers broke into its systems by tricking employees at a third-party contractor, skirting its digital defences to launch a cyberattack that will disrupt the British retailer for months. Giving the first details since disclosing the breach on April 22, Chief Executive Stuart Machin said all companies were vulnerable, and M&S had boosted its defences by trebling tech spending in the last three years. M&S has an IT contract with Tata Consulting Services. One source familiar with the matter told Reuters it was a means of access. TCS has declined to comment. Machin declined to comment on TCS specifically when asked if it was the weak link. "Unable to get into our systems by breaking through our digital defences, the attackers did try another route resorting to social engineering and entering through a third party rather than a system weakness," he told reporters. "Once access was gained, they used highly sophisticated techniques as part of the attack." Machin declined to comment on any ransom demand, citing advice from government agencies and law enforcement. M&S stopped online sales. It said on Wednesday they were unlikely to be fully restored until July. Machin said M&S became aware of the breach when it spotted suspicious activity during the Easter weekend of April 19-20. He said the time between the hackers gaining access and detection was "short". Experts told the company that the average was 10 days and in some cases many months. Britain's National Crime Agency told the BBC the attack investigation was focused on a cluster of young, English-speaking hackers. M&S, which has sales of nearly 14 billion pounds ($19 billion) a year, immediately called in experts, partners and authorities, Machin said. Some 600 systems had been scanned for damage, he said, and they were gradually being brought back online. ($1 = 0.7459 pounds) (Reporting by Paul Sandle and James Davey. Editing by Mark Potter)
The Star
19-05-2025
- General
- The Star
EU and UK reach tentative agreement ahead of summit -officials
FILE PHOTO: The European union flag is seen near The The Elizabeth Tower, commonly known as Big Ben in London, Britain, March 19, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso/File Photo
Reuters
21-03-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Heathrow shutdown raises concerns over contingency planning
An airplane remains parked on the tarmac at Heathrow International Airport after a fire at a nearby electrical substation wiped out the power at the airport, near London, Britain, March 21, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Summary Travel consultant estimates cost of closure at $26 million a day Airport handles around 1,300 flights a day Minister says government is looking at any lessons for infrastructure LONDON, March 21 (Reuters) - The closure of Britain's Heathrow Airport is set to affect the global aviation system for days at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, experts say, posing questions about why better contingency planning was not in place at the hub. Experts were in shock at the scale of the outage, which has not been seen since the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, as they tried to estimate the cost and breadth of the repercussions caused by a fire at a nearby electrical substation that knocked out the airport's power supply and its back-up power. Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Sign up here. Heathrow processes around 1,300 flights a day, according to Eurocontrol. The blaze, which was reported just after 11 p.m. (2300 GMT) on Thursday, forced planes to divert to airports across Britain and Europe, while many long-haul flights simply returned to their point of departure. The cost of the impact could total around 20 million pounds ($26 million) a day, said Paul Charles, a travel consultant, with no guarantee that Heathrow will reopen on Saturday given the vulnerability of the airport's power supply. "A back-up should be failsafe in the event of the core system being affected. Heathrow is such a vital piece of the UK's infrastructure that it should have failsafe systems," Charles told Reuters. Energy Minister Ed Miliband said the fire had prevented the power back-up system from working and that engineers were working to deploy a third back-up mechanism, adding the government was working to understand "what, if any, lessons it has for our infrastructure". The closure is set to have days-long knock-on effects globally, leaving airline passengers stranded. Airlines' carefully choreographed networks depend on airplanes and crews being in specific locations at specific times. Dozens of air carriers will have to hurriedly reconfigure their networks to move planes and crews around. BACK-UP POWER? "Even if the airport opens hopefully by the end of Friday, there will be impact running on several days because once aircraft are grounded somewhere away from an operation, they are stuck there with the crews operating the flights, and of course the customers, until those crews have been out to have the legally required rest periods," independent air transport consultant John Strickland said. "And if the planes are not back, they can't do the follow-on flights, which means that we get cancellations in the days ahead." Even a few minutes of delay can throw off the day's entire schedule and cause delays in other parts of the flight system. In this case, experts are asking how Heathrow did not have more back-up power units that could be brought on site to restart electricity more quickly. "I can't remember a piece of critical infrastructure being wholly shut down for at least a day because of a fire. I can't think of anything comparable," Tony Cox, an international risk management consultant, said. This is not the first aviation sector outage in Britain that has raised concern across the industry and in the political sphere. An outage of Britain's air traffic control system NATS in 2023 cost over 100 million pounds ($129 million), according to an independent review by Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, raising concerns about the stability of the system. The Heathrow outage, especially if it drags on past Friday, is likely to raise similar alarms and lead to extensive public scrutiny, especially given that under consumer rights law, customers impacted will not be able to seek compensation from airlines as the delays are not their fault. "Who actually picks up the bill ... remains to be seen because it will be a complex discussion and a heavy discussion certainly between the airport, the airlines, the electricity providers, insurance companies, of course, nobody will want to accept responsibility if it's possible not to," Strickland added. ($1 = 0.7730 pounds) Reporting by Joanna Plucinska and Andrew MacAskill in London, Dan Catchpole in Seattle, Tim Hepher in Paris; Editing by Alison Williams Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Joanna Plucinska Thomson Reuters Joanna reports on airlines and travel in Europe, including tourism trends, sustainability and policy. She was previously based in Warsaw, where she covered politics and general news. She wrote stories on everything from Chinese spies to migrants stranded in forests along the Belarusian border. In 2022, she spent six weeks covering the war in Ukraine, with a focus on the evacuation of children, war reparations and evidence that Russian commanders knew of sexual violence by their troops. Joanna graduated from the Columbia Journalism School in 2014. Before joining Reuters, she worked in Hong Kong for TIME and later in Brussels reporting on EU tech policy for POLITICO Europe.
New York Times
20-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Chinese Embassy Plan in London Sets Off Opposition
It was the site of Britain's Royal Mint, where coins were struck from 1810 to 1975. It sits atop the ruins of a Cistercian abbey dating to the 14th century, as well as a burial ground from the Black Death. And from the 16th century to the early 18th century, it was a supply yard for the Royal Navy. Now the storied compound known as Royal Mint Court is on the brink of a new chapter as the home of the Chinese Embassy in London. If Britain's Labour government approves the project, as seems likely, China will move its embassy from its current quarters in Marylebone to an imposing, 5.5-acre complex across town, which would be the largest diplomatic outpost in Europe. Handing Beijing such a prime piece of real estate, next to the Tower of London and in the shadow of the skyscrapers of London's City, has set off a storm of opposition from neighborhood residents, China hawks in the British Parliament and Hong Kong democracy advocates who have resettled in Britain. Some say China could use the embassy, with its proximity to strategic fiber-optic cables that snake under the financial district, to spy on dissidents and ordinary Britons. Others claim its location, on a busy road just off the Tower Bridge, would make it hard for crowds to gather to protest issues like Beijing's crackdown on Hong Kong or its persecution of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. 'This is not just a building; this is an extension of the Chinese Communist Party's power in the U.K.,' said Chloe Cheung, a representative of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a pro-democracy group, as she spoke to more than 1,000 protesters who rallied at the site this month. Protesters this month outside Royal Mint Court, site of the proposed Chinese Embassy in London. Credit... Carlos Jasso/Reuters Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
