Capita draws a line under £25 million cyber attack as it swings to half-year loss

Capita, the outsourcing giant that administers London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone and the Congestion Charge, fell to a loss today, after a major cyber attack last year.

But the FTSE 250 company is confident it has dealt with the incident in March, which it said today would cost up to £25 million, “reflecting the complexity of the forensic analysis of exfiltrated data.”

For the six-months to the end of June, Capita reported a loss of almost £68 million, down from a profit of £0.1 million in the same period a year ago. It also reflected the cost of business exits and some writedowns.

The cyber attack was carried out by a notorious Russian hacking group called Black Basta, which managed to steal from less than 0.1% of Capita’s servers. The company said today that the impact on its future growth outlook from the incident was “minimal”, and that it had signed government contracts worth over £1 billion since March.

It recently signed a £50 million contract with the City of London Police to run contact and victim engagement services for a new fraud reporting service.

Capita’s CEO, Jon Lewis, told Evening Standard that cyber attacks are “a plague that Western industries and companies are facing as a result of criminals in rouge states. It’s a multi-billion dollar endeavour on their part and it’s sapping Western companies of capex.”

Capita runs a range of essential services for institutions from the NHS to the military and it handles pensions administration for companies including the Royal Mail and Axa. It also handles disability payment assessments for the Department for Work and Pensions.

Lewis added that there was demand from other companies for insight into how Capita reacted to the cyber attack. “I could very easily spend 20% or 30% of my time just briefing boards and non-executive directors on what we did to manage the incident and get our services and operations up and running as quickly as we did.”

He is stepping down from the top job at the end of the year, having delayed his retirement to deal with the attack, and will be replaced by Adolfo Hernandez who is moving over from Amazon Web Services.