Over the four-day Easter weekend of 18 to 21 April 2025, customers of British high street fixture Marks & Spencer (M&S) took to social media in droves to lament an apparent outage that was causing disruption to in-store contactless payments.
At first glance, the disruption appeared to be the result of a run-of-the-mill IT glitch that happens from time to time, but by Tuesday 22 April, it was starting to become apparent that something far more sinister was going on. M&S shut down multiple public-facing services, such as online shopping and in-store click and collect, and CEO Stuart Machin made the rounds of the morning news studios to confirm that the retailer had been hit by a cyber attack.
The incident was the first in a series of damaging attacks against UK retailers – all orchestrated in similar fashion via the systems of an unwitting third-party tech supplier – to come to light.
As the likes of Co-op and even Harrods were drawn in, Scattered Spider – the English-speaking hacking collective behind the attack – and associated groups such as Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters became household names.
Over the summer of 2025, the teen hackers turned their attention to other targets, hitting organisations operating in multiple verticals all over the world. The cyber crime spree arguably hit its zenith – or nadir depending on your point of view – with the August 2025 attack on carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the repercussions of which continue to reverberate around the UK economy nearly eight months on.
But the chaos kicked off at M&S, with shelves left empty as store managers struggled with downed ordering systems, and homes across the nation going without upmarket picky teas, pig-shaped gummy sweets and caterpillar-themed cakes.
Third-party vulnerabilities: it started with a phone call
“A year on from the M&S attack, the numbers tell a stark story. Retail cyber attacks grew around 34% last year, and the trajectory since then suggests that figure has only climbed further,” says Check Point UK and Ireland head of enterprise, Charlotte Wilson.
“What the incident made clear is how the nature of the attack itself should be understood. The initial entry point at M&S, and at others like Jaguar Land Rover … was a phone call. Someone convinced a helpdesk operative to hand over system access by impersonating an employee. That was the door in, and it opened onto hundreds of millions of pounds of damage. The most expensive cyber attack in British retail history began with a conversation.”
Muhammad Yahya Patel, Huntress virtual chief information security officer (vCISO) and EMEA cyber security adviser, says it is precisely this relatively unsophisticated origin story that marks the M&S breach as a case study that every security team – whether working in retail or not – should have printed out and stuck on the wall.
“The attackers didn’t find a zero-day. They didn’t bypass a next-gen firewall. They picked up the phone, pretended to be an M&S employee and asked a third-party service desk to reset a password. That was it,” says Patel.
“Everything that followed, the Active Directory database exfiltration, the credential cracking, the ransomware deployment across VMware hosts – all of it flowed from lack of service desk processes.
“Perhaps the most sobering detail [is] the four individuals arrested by the NCA in July were aged 17 to 20. These weren’t nation-state actors with deep pockets and government backing. They were young, English speaking and highly effective at finding the gap between an organisation’s technical controls, people and processes.”
The lasting effect on boardroom conversations
But significantly, says Check Point’s Wilson, the M&S attack seems to have served as a much-needed alarm call for the retail industry, and many of her customers have started scrutinising their supply chains as a result.
“The attack exposed a hard truth: your security posture is only as strong as the weakest link in your vendor ecosystem, and for many retailers, that link had never been seriously stress-tested. The supply chain conversations happening in boardrooms today simply weren’t happening 18 months ago,” she says.
“Cyber risk is now seen as a board-level issue in a way it simply wasn’t before. That cultural shift may prove to be the attack’s most important legacy.”
Dominic Mortimer, who leads the red team at Bulletproof from WorkNest, agrees that security leaders seem to be more alert to the dangers of social engineering.
“The M&S breach accounted for a massive and direct uptick in organisations wanting to include similar breach scenarios in their tests,” Mortimer tells Computer Weekly. “I think like 80% of the latest red teams we’ve done following that breach announcement have all included help desk [or] vishing simulation scenarios to ensure the organisation’s resilience and defences extend to these third-party areas.
“It very much shone a light on an area that had previously been neglected by organisations and many reconsidered or approached with greater scrutiny their reliance on outsourced third-party entities. So, it’s very much become a warning tale that organisations have taken to heart, which is a massive positive despite the bad times had by M&S.”
Post-breach lessons
This said, cyber security in retail remains an uphill battle, and Wilson highlights some structural factors that still make shops harder to protect than, for example, financial services companies, or business-to-business publishing houses.
These factors include – but are not limited to – more public-facing contact points that lead to significantly higher volumes of phishing attempts, frequent frontline staff turnover and historically lower average security maturity. This all adds up to a threat environment that is hard to harden. Furthermore, Wilson adds, retailers operate on such tight margins that cyber security faces chronic underinvestment
It is perhaps not much of a surprise then that Check Point’s most recent cyber attack statistics for March 2025 reveal that the consumer goods and services sector was one of the most heavily targeted in the UK.
Huntress’ Patel says he is now seeing a wave of multi-channel approaches by hackers using email, phone calls, SMS and even Microsoft Teams to build trust with employees before delivering the killer blow. This, he says, makes them hard to stop with any single method of control.
“It requires a culture of verification and education, not just a stack of tools,” he says. “The organisations that come out of this period strongest won’t necessarily be the ones who spent the most. They’ll be the ones who were honest about where their real gaps were and closed them.
“At Huntress, we continuously see attackers inside business as we step in to stop them in their tracks. We are witnessing a professionalised scaling of the identity theft ecosystem. Adversarial efficiency is at an all time high. By transforming unauthorised access into reliable, long-term footholds, attackers are treating networks like a marketplace.
Our collective ability to recognise and resist that kind of secondary exploitation simply hasn’t improved. The attackers know it, and they’re counting on it Charlotte Wilson, Check Point
“Organisations must pivot their strategy if you are only watching the ‘break-in’, you are missing the breach. The priority must shift to rigorous, post-authentication visibility and anomaly detection,” he says.
Wilson reflects that the M&S incident seems to have prompted the government to start to act with more urgency. She notes the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), in its most recent annual report, says it dealt with 204 “nationally significant” cyber attacks from September 2024 to September 2025, more than doubling the previous record of 89. She also points out the progress made on the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (CSBR), and Westminster’s Cyber Action Plan and proposed £210m centralised cyber unit.
“We are finally starting to see government not just understand but actively communicate the societal and economic cost of cyber threats. That is progress,” she says. “What hasn’t changed, though, is individual behaviour. Consumers going about their daily lives aren’t taking meaningfully more care with their personal data.
“And there’s a chapter of this story that hasn’t been told nearly loudly enough: the wave of class-action scams that followed the breaches. They’re still out there on social media: deepfake videos asking whether you were affected, whether you might be entitled to compensation, harvesting the details of the very people who were already victims once.
“The original breach made the headlines, but the scams that fed on it didn’t. And from a societal perspective, our collective ability to recognise and resist that kind of secondary exploitation simply hasn’t improved. The attackers know it, and they’re counting on it,” she warns.
