In light of recent geopolitical events, and the increased threat to corporate infrastructure, organisations across the UK must assume that they will be forced to contend with a cyber-attack in the near future and prepare accordingly. Indeed, the NCSC has already set out its own guidance to help organisations bolster their defences, which we strongly advise you to read and implement.
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For some years now, Cloud adoption has been steadily on the rise across the UK's Finance sector, with organisations including banks, insurers, and investment firms phasing out increasingly cumbersome legacy systems in favour of more scalable, agile, and cost-effective infrastructure. Indeed, more than 48% of UK banking services are now built on Cloud infrastructure.
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The Hospitality & Leisure sector is inherently people-focused, with the personal touch making all the difference to guests' experiences. But, as we have already discussed on this blog, the multiple lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have forced to the entire sector to adopt new ways of engaging with guests, utilising next-gen smart technology to deliver truly bespoke experiences and streamlined access to a wide range of services.
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The public sector's relationship with technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate, as familiar legacy systems are increasingly phased out in favour of leading-edge digital infrastructure that offers levels of scalability, sustainability, and operational resilience that would previously have been dismissed as impossible.
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Any organisation that has tried to recover from a ransomware attack knows that it can be time-consuming and costly. Companies hit by an attack must choose between paying a ransom or recovering encrypted data from a backup.
Unfortunately, ransomware gangs are too aware that they can leverage significantly higher ransoms from their corporate victims if they have also compromise the company's backups. For this reason, we are seeing more and more cyber attacks targeting backups because they know that organisations desperately need them to recover if they want to avoid paying a ransom to cybercriminals.
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Newly-released research indicates that ransomware attacks reached a record high in May, with the surge primarily fueled by a massive increase in the number of attacks perpetrated by the LockBit ransomware group and its affiliates.
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Car dealerships have been brought to a standstill across the United States after a software provider was hit by a ransomware attack.
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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is rapidly establishing itself as the solution of choice for the next generation of enterprise networks, where optimal control, visibility, and scalability are essential. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, the SASE market experienced a 23% surge, as more and more organisations began taking advantage of its capabilities.
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From start-ups to global leaders, across the public and private sectors, organisations' ongoing growth and brand reputation rises or falls based on the quality of their networks. As a result, network transformation is a growing priority, with IT leaders looking to replace cumbersome legacy systems with flexible, scalable, and secure connections that support tomorrow's highly dynamic workflows.
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Despite the numerous interconnected elements now involved in effective digital transformation, the network remains the foundation of everything, ensuring any investment in new technologies delivers the best possible ROI, and that teams at all levels are empowered to deliver their very best, 24 / 7. As such, the digital transformation journey must always begin with a full network transformation.
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The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned the IT helpdesks of retailers to be on their guard against bogus support calls they might receive from hackers pretending to be staff locked out of their accounts.
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Having returned from the BSA Conference 2025, it was clear that building societies are navigating a critical juncture - balancing their relationship-led service models while addressing the urgent need to modernise outdated systems and improve operational efficiency. Given the current geopolitical climate, and the increasing pace of innovation, developing a strategy that not only solves immediate challenges, but offers sufficient scope to tackle future issues, can often seem like a moving target.
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The Challenge
In Q3 of 2024, the CEO of a UK-based bank received an email from a ransomware group, informing him that the bank's data had been encrypted and would be released on the dark web unless a ransom demand was paid. Although several insurers and consultants were engaged to resolve the situation, the slow response times made it clear that an alternative approach would be needed.
Finally, in order to minimise the resulting downtime and resume operations as soon as possible, without giving in to the criminals' ransom demand, the organisation engaged Exponential-e to restore and secure their critical servers. With even the shortest period of downtime resulting in serious financial and reputational damage, a team of incident response specialists immediately began the restoration process, aiming to have the bank's systems back online in days rather than weeks.
The Solution
The restoration process began with a thorough audit of the IT ecosystem to establish which servers had been impacted, after which the affected VMs were powered down. A new, fully isolated VDC was created to store these VMs once they were recovered, along with a completely new firewall zone.
With the affected servers restored into this new VDC zone, firewalls were established to allow for the most basic access, after which malware scans were conducted. These scans continued for two days, during which the customer was granted initial access to the servers via a temporary SSL VPN with Azure MFA, allowing them to resume operations in just three days.
At this point, Zerto replication was set up for the new VMs, while Exponential-e simultaneously engaged with the third party that was conducting a forensic investigation.
Connectivity was soon re-established for the customer's other offices, at which point users were brought back online. Firewall logs were provided for the forensic team, along with initial access to VM images via vCloud Director.
Finally, a test rebuild of the affected VMs was conducted and finalised within two days, and additional firewall policies established.
Exponential-e has repeated variations of this process for multiple other organisations affected by ransomware attacks, allowing them to resume operations as quickly as possible and ensure their critical infrastructure is secured against future attacks.
The Result
Ongoing communication between all parties involved ,including a dedicated team of incident response specialists at Exponential-e with a defined action plan ensured a seamless restoration process. Day-to-day operations resumed in just seven days, without paying the criminals' ransom demand.
Don't wait for a crisis to expose the cracks, fortify your defences today. Discover how expert response turned seven days of chaos into operational recovery.
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