Major technology outages create opportunities for cyber criminals as well as operational challenges for affected organisations. Matt Hull, VP of cyber intelligence and response at NCC Group, warns that attackers may seek to exploit confusion through social engineering and impersonation, while urging organisations to examine how prepared they are to keep critical services running during prolonged disruption.
Matt Hull, VP of cyber intelligence and response at NCC Group, shares two key considerations for organisations responding to disruption:
Stay vigilant against opportunistic attacks
"Cyber criminals will be moving quickly to exploit the uncertainty, disruption and frustration that events like this create. Organisations should remind colleagues to be particularly vigilant, verify any unexpected contact through established channels before acting, and report anything suspicious without delay.
“Social engineering is a particular concern here, especially vishing and impersonation of Microsoft or internal IT support teams. With email services affected, traditional phishing may be less effective in the immediate term, but phone calls, text messages and other channels remain fully available to attackers. We could see attempts to convince people to reset passwords, approve multi-factor authentication requests or provide remote access to their devices."
Build resilience beyond the immediate outage
"This is a prime example of the importance of not only cyber resilience but business resilience. Reports that hospitals, schools and other essential services are affected demonstrate the wide impact that a system outage, regardless of the cause, can have. Critical infrastructure operators must interrogate and practise their plans for service delivery continuity when systems are down.
“Organisations should consider out-of-band communications, which is any method of exchanging information that uses a separate, independent channel or network rather than the standard system.
"Recovery may take time, so organisations need to start now on the immediate priority of restoring services. But once the pressure eases, leadership teams need to ask hard questions about how to build their resilience. Regularly exercising a major digital outage scenario is one of the most reliable ways to find those gaps and address them.”
Matt Hull is Vice President of Cyber Intelligence and Response at NCC Group, leading the global Cyber Response and Intelligence (CRI) capability.
A former Detective Constable specialising in cyber crime, Matt brings deep operational experience across investigation, response, and intelligence-led operations.
