Capita

Cleanup costs from a Russian cyber attack wiped £58m from Capita’s value after the incident pushed the outsourcer to a £68m half-year loss.

Shares in the London-listed company, which collects the BBC TV licence fee, plunged as much as 16pc on Friday after it said dealing with the March cyber incident will cost up to £25m.

The figure represents a 25pc increase on estimated costs previously announced by the company.

It came as Capita posted a pre-tax loss of £67.9m for the first six months of the year, compared with a profit of £100,000 a year earlier.

A company spokesman said: “Having taken extensive steps to recover and secure our data, using third party monitoring we still have found no evidence of any information in circulation, on the dark web or otherwise, more than three months after the cyber incident.”

In addition to costs related to the cyber attack, Capita said the loss was driven by business exits and write-downs on the value of some of its divisions.

Capita runs outsourced IT services for substantial parts of the NHS, including many NHS Trusts that oversee hospitals as well as some local GP surgeries.

It also holds a £456m contract to collect and enforce the BBC TV licence fee, and runs military recruiting processes for the Ministry of Defence.

The company has tapped up an Amazon executive, turnaround specialist Adolfo Hernandez, as its next chief executive after Jon Lewis announced his retirement on Monday.

Mr Lewis has presided over an 88pc decline in the company’s share price since 2017.

He claimed in an April newspaper interview about the hacker incident that Capita’s response would “go down as a case history for how to deal with a sophisticated cyberattack”.

March’s attack saw Capita’s 50,000 staff locked out of its IT systems as the company raced to understand its extent.

Russia’s Black Basta cybercrime gang claimed responsibility for the attack and shared samples of stolen data on the dark web.

Around 350 pension funds across the UK were put on alert after Capita revealed some of the stolen data contained British pensioners’ personal information.



Capita did not comment on whether it had paid a ransom.

Among Capita’s innovations to try and stem its losses is its use of so-called metaverse virtual reality technology for training Royal Navy submariners.

It is also making increased use of AI, it said, with the technology contributing to “a 30pc reduction in human contact required” for one of its customer service clients..