{"id":263083,"date":"2025-07-24T13:25:53","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T07:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/how-did-a-150-year-old-company-sink-because-of-a-password-2\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T13:25:53","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T07:40:53","slug":"how-did-a-150-year-old-company-sink-because-of-a-password-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.insurancekhabar.com\/how-did-a-150-year-old-company-sink-because-of-a-password-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How did a 150-year-old company sink because of a password?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Kathmandu. A recent example of how dangerous the ransomware gang can be has come to light. The gang destroyed a British company that was more than 150 years old and left 700 employees unemployed in an instant. An event started with just one password. The extortion gang caught a &#8220;weak password&#8221; and shut it down the company forever. <\/p>\n<p>Northamptonshire transport company KPN is one of thousands of British companies. Who have been victims of such cyber attacks. In recent months, big companies such as M&#038;S, Co-Op and Harrods have been hit by cyber attacks. &#8220;The data of all its 6.5 million members has been stolen,&#8221; co-op CEO said last week. \u2019<\/p>\n<p>With regard to KNP, it is believed that the hackers first guessed the employee&#8217;s password and then entered the company&#8217;s computer system. They then encrypted the company&#8217;s data and locked its internal systems. KNP director Paul Abbott says, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t tell employees that the company could collapse because of weak passwords. \u2019<\/p>\n<p>Richard Hearn, CEO of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), says, &#8220;What is necessary is that companies and organizations take steps to protect their systems. \u2019<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><strong>Company drowned by a small mistake<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>KNP operated 500 trucks in 2023. Most of the trucks were operating under the &#8216;Knights of Old&#8217; brand. The company said, &#8220;Our IT department follows industry standards. It also adopted an insurance policy against cyber attacks. However, a group of hackers called Akira entered the system and employees were unable to access any data they needed to run the business. <\/p>\n<p>The hackers said they would have to pay a ransom to get the data back. &#8220;If you&#8217;re reading this, it means your company&#8217;s internal infrastructure has been completely or partially shut down. Keep tears and anger aside and try to have a positive conversation. \u2019<\/p>\n<p>The hackers did not disclose the ransom amount. But experts dealing with such events estimate that it could be in millions of pounds. &#8220;It faces major attacks every day,&#8221; the NCSC said. \u2019<\/p>\n<p>NCSC is a part of GCHQ. It is one of the uk&#8217;s three security services, along with mi5 and mi6. Sam (name changed) leads the NCSC team. Which deals with daily cyber attacks. &#8220;Hackers are not doing anything new,&#8221; he says. <\/p>\n<p>Sam told Panorama that they were just looking for a weak link. &#8220;They are constantly looking for organizations that can be targeted. On what day can they be targeted and exploited? &#8216;<span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">-from BBC translated<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathmandu. A recent example of how dangerous the ransomware gang can be has come to light. The gang destroyed a British company that was more than 150 years old and left 700 employees unemployed in an instant. An event started with just one password. The extortion gang caught a &#8220;weak password&#8221; and shut it down [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":222614,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45044,45159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news-en","category-news-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/media\/222614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insurancekhabar.com\/ikbrapi\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}