Last year, I wrote about ransomware attacks (for the second time). I think there have been many since then but you do not hear about most of them. It can be absolutely devastating personally when you're the victim of one of these criminal attacks. The costs to an organisation or government are even higher. I think they might even cause a business to fail in some circumtances.
The recent news is that Marks and Spencer, a British retailer, has been hit by a "cyberattack", and it looks like it is ransomware. There's a write-up at Bleeping Computer and a few details are given. It is very hard to know how to protect yourself from this sort of thing, or deal with the aftermath. There are obvious protections but I think the defence is always behind the offence and it's increasingly trite to just push the messages to "patch your systems" or update your "antivirus".
It looks like something has been going on at the Co-op as well. A "hack"? It's a bit suspicious with all news coming out from them just now. The lead at the BBC article linked is :
Staff at the Co-op are being ordered to keep their cameras on during remote work meetings, and verify all attendees, as the company deals with an ongoing cyber attack.
Well ... great. But I recall that, not so long ago, a company was conned into doing a multi-million dollar transfer by criminals faking a voice on a telephone call (The Guardian) :
The British engineering company Arup has confirmed it was the victim of a deepfake fraud after an employee was duped into sending HK$200m (£20m) to criminals by an artificial intelligence-generated video call.
That is a lot of money. I think the "AI" is getting good enough to be on video now perhaps, so I think that all bets are off!