UK’s Interserve penalised with £4.4M due to a breach incident

UK’s data protection regulator has recently fined the construction firm Interserve £4.4 million or about $5 million after compromising hundreds of thousands of employees’ sensitive data to a ransomware attack. According to a statement from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the penalty was caused by the firm’s failure to apply security measures against cyberattacks.

This year, the data protection regulator in the UK has already penalised two organisations after failing to set appropriate security measures that caused ransomware attacks against their networks, ultimately compromising sensitive data.

 

The Interserve security breach resulted in losing numerous employee data to hackers.

 

According to reports, the affected construction firm’s compromised employee data includes contact details, bank account details, national insurance numbers, and other special categories like religion, disabilities, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and health data.

Investigations about the incident revealed that the security breach occurred after an employee opened a malicious email and downloaded an attached file containing malware. Interserve’s IT systems have not detected the threat of this malicious email, thus resulting in a grave company network infection.

Interserve has also not sent a follow-up alert from the first one they released, has used outdated software systems and protocols, and lacked proper staff training to address potential cyberattacks such as the one that transpired.

ICO explained that even though the firm’s anti-virus and threat-detection solution had quarantined the malware, it failed to investigate the full scope of the suspicious activity thoroughly. The threat actors compromised about 283 systems and 16 accounts and uninstalled the company’s anti-virus. In total, up to 113,000 employee data were impacted.

Authorities believe that cyber risks come not only from the threat actors but also from the company’s complacency in implementing security measures to comply with regulations against these cyberthreats. The ICO warned other organisations to be more geared up against cyberattacks if they want to avoid similar penalties.

Because of the Interserve security incident, ICO said that the impacted employee data could be abused for identity theft or financial fraud. Hence, all affected individuals are advised to monitor their situation and report to authorities if suspicious activities from unknown entities attempt to hit them.