Royal Mail suffers ‘severe service disruption’ to export services after cyber incident

Royal Mail is suffering “severe service disruption” to its international export services following a “cyber incident“, the company has announced.

The postal firm is unable to dispatch export items including letters and parcels to overseas destinations, while import operations continue with “minor delays”, according to a statement.

Customers have been urged to temporarily stop sending export items, while items already in transit could experience “delay or disruption”.

There is no evidence at this stage that customer data has been breached in the incident, i understands.

Hanah Darley, Head of Threat Research at Darktrace, a cyber security company, suggested that the scope of the outage is “extensive” and said it could take weeks to restore the system to “trusted operational states”.

She said: “The outage currently affecting Royal Mail’s international exports affects just outbound international parcels and mail, suggesting either an outsourced third party supplier is the source of the cyber disruption, or there is a specific isolated system, rather than something that is enterprise wide across Royal Mail.”

Ms Darley added that the information cyber attackers gained from being inside the digital infrastructure could “leave the victim organisation vulnerable to further breaches in the future”.

A Royal Mail source called the comments “speculative” but was unable to give further information about the nature of the incident while it is under investigation.

Royal Mail said in a statement: “We have asked customers temporarily to stop submitting any export items into the network while we work hard to resolve the issue.

“Some customers may experience delay or disruption to items already shipped for export. Our import operations continue to perform a full service with some minor delays.

“Our teams are working around the clock to resolve this disruption and we will update customers as soon as we have more information.

“We immediately launched an investigation into the incident and we are working with external experts. We have reported the incident to our regulators and the relevant security authorities.

“We would like to sincerely apologise to impacted customers for any disruption this incident may be causing.”

A National Cyber Security Centre spokesman said: “We are aware of an incident affecting Royal Mail Group Ltd and are working with the company, alongside the National Crime Agency, to fully understand the impact.”

The National Crime Agency has been approached for comment.

An Information Commissioner’s Office spokesperson said: “Royal Mail has made us aware of an incident and we will be making inquiries.”

This story is being updated…