On Friday 31 March, Capita confirmed there had been a cyber ‘incident,’ which has now been confirmed as an attack.

While the UK government contractor has not yet confirmed the nature of the attack, employees of Capita said its IT services were impacted, including its Microsoft 365 Suite.

Capita is one of the largest suppliers for the UK public sector, and provides supplies for many military institutions as well as the NHS, and is contracted for HM Revenue and Customs.

As revealed by a Capita employee to The Guardian, employees were unable to log into their laptops, as their credentials were deemed incorrect.

Staff had to revert to manual notes as Capita’s critical infrastructure took a hit.

In a statement released on 31 March, Capita said that a “cyber incident” impacted its internal Microsoft Office 365 applications.

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“Our IT security monitoring capabilities swiftly alerted us to the incident, and we quickly invoked our established and practised technical crisis management protocols. Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue. The issue was limited to parts of the Capita network and there is no evidence of customer, supplier or colleague data having been compromised,” the statement read.

Because of Capita’s size, reach, and governmental importance, the potential of a cyber-attack was immediately concerning, as it could be a target of nation-state actors or those looking for financial gain.

Capita has since restored its system, according to the statement: “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.”