Cyber attack on SPAR grocery stores in Yorkshire/England

Sicherheit (Pexels, allgemeine Nutzung)[German]There was a successful cyber attack on SPAR stores in Yorkshire, England. Some of the stores had to close because payment systems could no longer be used and card payments were no longer possible. Here is some information about what I know so far.


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The first news already came under my eyes yesterday on Twitter via the following tweet. It immediately reminded me of COOP-Sweden (Coop-Sweden closes 800 stores after Kaseya VSA supply chain attack by REvil gang) and the attack on Media Markt/Saturn (Media Markt/Saturn: Ransomware attack by hive gang, $240 million US ransom demand).

SPAR Cyber Attack in Yorkshire

Supermarket chain SPAR has fallen victim to a successful cyberattack on its IT and has been forced to close a number of stores following a cyberattack. A spokesperson confirmed to Sky News that more than 300 stores were affected by the incident. However, some of the stores were able to avoid complete closure by switching to cash payments.

Spar-Statement

The SPAR stores in the north of England were probably affected, as the company already confirmed on its Facebook page on Sunday, according to this article. On Twitter, there is this tweet (see photo above), which confirms that due to a total IT failure that affected all SPAR stores, they had to remain closed throughout Sunday. It was not possible to give a date for the restart. The website said that the chain was forced to close all stores in the north of the country after a cyber attack caused a "large and widespread IT outage across the entire northern Spar network." On the company's website, there was the notice:


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All Northern Spar stores will be closed for an unknown period of time. We will update you as soon as we know more, but in the meantime, please understand that our staff will not be able to open until systems are restored. At this point, no one knows if that will be 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days.

And further, the company is quoted with the following news:

We ultimately had to make the difficult decision to close our stores for the day and let employees go home.

Our latest information is that a solution is being worked on around the clock and throughout the night, but no timeline can yet be given as to when it will be considered stable enough to be rolled out to stores.

We sincerely hope to wake up to better news tomorrow. We will do our best to keep our customers updated via social media.

Please share these posts to spread the word and avoid unnecessary trips. We can only sincerely apologize for not being able to #thereforyou, but we hope you understand that this is out of our control. We thank you.

In the meantime, however, it appears that some stores were conducting controlled tests yesterday (Monday) to see if a reopening solution would work. From the UK's National Cyber Secure Centre comes this announcement about the attack on SPAR. 


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