Security News > 2023 > April > Capita confirms security attack caused pre-weekend outages

Capita - everyone's favorite outsourcing badass - is still working to restore services for some customers after admitting the IT outage of certain services on Friday was caused by a cyber attack and efforts to contain the spread. The shape shifting tech biz, which has £6.5 billion worth of public sector contracts booked in, said before the weekend that a technical problem meant staff couldn't access work IT, including Microsoft cloud accounts.

The cause of that blackout was confirmed today, with Capita saying via its website that on March 31 the biz "Experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft 365 applications. This caused disruption to some services provided to individual clients, though the majority of our client services remained in operation."

Capita says its security monitoring canary alerted personnel to the issue and the organization brought forth "Established and practiced technical crisis management protocols."

"Working in collaboration with our specialist technical partners, we have restored Capita colleague access to Microsoft Office 365 and we are making good progress restoring remaining client services in a secure and controlled manner," Capita added.

The company, which said in its 2022 Annual Report that it employed 52,000 people, is divided into three business units: Capita Public Services, Capita Experience, and Capita Portfolio.

A wave of 415 contracts held by Capita said to be worth £700 million are due to expire between 2022 and 2025, so this security incident won't help the corporation's cause when it comes to renewal time.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/03/capita_confirms_security_attack_as/