M&S ‘pure chaos’ after cyber attack, Skype shuts down today

A M&S insider has told Sky News it could be “months” before the retailer fully recovers from an ongoing, severe cyber attack – and that the company had no plan for such an incident. Hackers have been holding the High Street brand to ransom for more than a week now, forcing it to suspend online orders and halt recruitment. An employee at M&S’s head office, who spoke to Sky News on condition of anonymity, said that last week had been “just pure chaos”. “We didn’t have any business continuity plan [for this], we didn’t have a cyber attack plan,” the source said. Sky News

Marks and Spencer has been forced to suspend some meal deal offers in stores as the company continues to grapple with a devastating cyber attack. Shoppers have been warned that M&S is unable to to fulfil certain offers because of stock availability issues caused by the hack. One sign in an M&S in Victoria Station read: “Due to availability issues we are temporarily unable to fulfil this meal deal. Please bear with us while we work through this.” Telegraph 

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned that criminals launching cyber attacks at British retailers are impersonating IT help desks to break into organisations. Hackers have targeted Marks & Spencer, Co-op and Harrods in the last two weeks, and on Friday the anonymous group told the BBC there will be more attacks soon. Now the NCSC, the government agency responsible for cyber security, has issued guidance to organisations, urging them to review their IT help desk “password reset processes” to reduce their chances of getting hacked. BBC 

Amazon is selling books marketed at people seeking techniques to manage their ADHD that claim to offer expert advice yet appear to be authored by a chatbot such as ChatGPT. Amazon’s marketplace has been deluged with works produced by artificial intelligence that are easy and cheap to publish but include unhelpful or dangerous misinformation, such as shoddy travel guidebooks and mushroom foraging books that encourage risky tasting. The Guardian 

After nearly 22 years of connecting people across the globe, Skype is shutting down on May 5, marking the end of an era for one of the pioneers of internet communication. Launched in 2003, Skype quickly became a revolutionary tool for free voice and video calls over the internet, amassing more than 300 million monthly users at its peak in the mid-2010s. The free platform changed how people communicated across borders, long before Zoom or FaceTime. Al Jazeera 

Spanish and Portuguese mobile and internet users turned to Elon Musk’s Starlink in record numbers on Monday, as a widespread electricity blackout on the Iberian peninsula exposed vulnerabilities in telecoms networks. Usage of the Starlink satellite communications service rose 35 per cent above average when telecoms coverage dropped in the two countries, according to data analysed by the Financial Times. Usage was 60 per cent higher in Spain than average on Tuesday, as mobile networks struggled to get back up to speed. FT.com

An estimated 350bn emails are sent each day. British office workers receive as many as 10,000 per year, according to one study by Warwick University. Your typical journalist would probably see five times as many. Inboxes are bursting – and now AI bots are being added into the mix. AI chatbots, writing tools and automatic replies are flooding the email products used by hundreds of millions of office workers. Telegraph