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Regulators have urged UK pensions schemes to analyze whether or not they have suffered information breaches following a cyber assault on outsourcer Capita.
The Pensions Regulator on Sunday mentioned it had written to the tons of of pension funds that make use of Capita to manage their cost techniques, urging them to “decide whether or not there’s a threat to their scheme’s information”.
London-listed Capita disclosed earlier this month that hackers might need accessed buyer information following a cyber assault on its servers in March.
The Pensions Regulator wrote to greater than 300 pension funds, which embody a mixture of private-sector outlined profit and outlined contribution schemes, in line with an individual acquainted with the matter.
Within the letter, which was first reported by the Sunday Instances, the regulator requested trustees to contact Capita to seek out out whether or not their information may have been caught up within the breach, and reminded schemes of the duty to reveal any information losses to people and regulators.
“We take IT safety and the chance of cyber assaults extraordinarily severely,” the regulator mentioned in an announcement.
The USS, the UK’s largest personal sector pension plan, contracts Capita to manage its pensions software program for greater than 465,000 members. USS didn’t instantly reply to a request in search of touch upon whether or not it obtained a letter from the regulator.
Capita is a serious outsourcer to each the personal and public sectors and is without doubt one of the UK authorities’s greatest contractors.
The corporate gives IT providers amongst its companies, which additionally embody working the London congestion charging zone, gathering the BBC licence price and overseeing coaching for the Royal Navy.
Capita in late March first disclosed an “IT situation” that left employees unable to entry some techniques and disrupted providers offered to native authority purchasers.
The outsourcer confirmed on April 20 that there had been an information breach and that hackers might have accessed buyer and inner information. It mentioned the incident affected about 4 per cent of its servers, and that it had discovered “some proof of restricted information exfiltration”.
It added that hackers accessed its servers on or round March 22, and it had managed to interrupt the operation on March 31 and had “considerably restricted” the incident.
The corporate has refused to substantiate or deny whether or not the information breach fashioned a part of a ransomware assault.
“Since March thirty first we’ve been in common contact with trustees and regulators, and we’ll maintain them up to date as our investigation into the cyber incident progresses,” Capita mentioned in an announcement on Sunday.
Ransomware assaults and different information breaches are a rising drawback for international companies, and have just lately been reported at a provider to the world’s largest semiconductor gear producers, Japan’s Fujitsu and the UK’s Royal Mail.
A September report from consultancy PwC discovered that solely 14 per cent of worldwide firms surveyed had not suffered an information breach prior to now three years.
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