Royal Mail making limited progress on ransomware recovery

Report

In its 2023 Global risks report, the World Economic Forum said that the “ever-increasing intertwining of technologies with the critical functioning of societies” was becoming an increasing source of global risk, and forecast that “attempts to disrupt critical technology-enabled resources and services,” of which the incident affecting Royal Mail is one, will become more common.

Indeed, it said, its 2022-2023 Global risks perception survey predicted that cyber attacks on critical national infrastructure (CNI) would be comparable to the current crises in energy and food supply, rising inflation, and the cost-of-living crisis in terms of their global impact this year.

The report added that the critical functioning of whole economies would become more exposed with breakthroughs in technologies such as quantum computing.

Mark Wojtasiak, product strategy vice-president at Vectra, a supplier of artificial intelligence-backed threat detection services, said: “CNI is becoming an increasingly attractive target for criminal cyber gangs, posing the very real threat of major disruption to areas such as food, water and energy.

“In a time where vital services are already under immense strain from rising costs and supply disruption, organisations responsible for CNI can’t afford for cyber attacks to cause further turmoil.

“While WEF outlines the need to develop cross-sector resilience to cyber risks, this should be seen as a starting block,” said Wojtasiak.

“In practice, CNI organisations have to address their rising attack surface, focusing on improving their visibility into their IT environments. This means reducing the noise they face from security alerts, and achieving clearer attack signal intelligence so security teams can accurately and reliably prioritise threats, stopping attacks before they become breaches.”