Over 300 SPAR Stores Switch To Cash-only Payments After Cyber Attack

In the north of England, a major cyberattack hits recently on more than 300 branches of the convenience store chain, “Spar.” It has led to the closure of these stores at a time, and the experts have described this issue as a “total outage.”

Across Lancashire, the outage is still in effect as Lawrence Hunt & Co Ltd claimed, this company runs 25 branches Spar across Lancashire, and this outage is affecting the following departments across the SPAR network:-

• Credit cards
• Back office systems

Due to this “total outage,” the store operators and their corresponding staffs are unable to operate the stores, as they are prevented from taking any card payments since the systems were locked.

However, some of the remote branches of the chain are still operating but, here, they are operating the remote branches with cash transactions only for grocery items only.

One of the largest distributors of the SPAR chain in North also remains offline, the James Hall and Co who distribute stock to hundreds of SPAR shops. On Sunday the cyberattack hit the Spar chain, and after the attack, the IT technicians are still working to fix the issue.

Apology

Here’s what an official Twitter account for Spar in the north of England told shoppers:-

“We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing our customers and we are working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation. This has affected around 330 SPAR stores across the North of England over the past 24 hours. It is currently impacting stores’ ability to process card payments meaning that a number of SPAR stores are currently closed to shoppers or only taking cash payments.”

In total, more than 13000 stores were operated by SPAR across the globe, and this major cyberattack hit the Lancashire county stores only. 

Till now the SPAR has not provided any details regarding the attack, but it is assumed that this is a ransomware attack. However, the NCSC (UK’s national cybersecurity center) affirmed that they are already aware of this incident, and closely tracking every activity.