Harrods becomes latest victim in retail cyber attacks – UKTN

Department store Harrods has become the latest UK retailer to fall victim to a targeted cyber attack.

The luxury London store was forced to close a selection of its IT systems after an attempted cyber breach from hackers.  

“We recently experienced attempts to gain unauthorised access to some of our systems,” Harrods said in a statement.  

“Our seasoned IT security team immediately took proactive steps to keep systems safe and as a result we have restricted internet access at our sites today.” 

The retailer was able to keep its site and physical stores operational. 

The origin of the attack is not yet known, however, Toby Lewis, head of threat analysis at Darktrace said there could be some connections between it and other recent attacks at fellow retailers M&S and Co-op. 

“Details of the cyber attack at Harrods are still low and we shouldn’t rule out that the three incidents impacting M&S, Co-op and Harrods are coincidence,” Lewis said. 

“However, with the information publicly available we can see two other likely scenarios: either a common supplier or technology used by all three retailers has been breached […] or the scale of the M&S incident has prompted security teams to relook at their logs and act on activity they wouldn’t have previously judged a risk.” 

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity advisor at ESET, said it is common for businesses in the same sector to “become secondary targets after a huge cyber-attack”. 

“As the strain of ransomware called DragonForce can simply be purchased on the dark web in a model called ‘Ransomware-As-A-Service’, other hacking groups are also able to attempt their luck on similar businesses,” added Moore.

Recent research from cybersecurity group Tenable has warned that large language models have the capacity to allow for the quick generation of harmful code, though many AI companies place guardrails in their products to prevent this. 

This third successive targeted attack on a major UK retailer has raised questions about the resilience of legacy systems. 

Already have an account? Log in