It’s Not Just A Cyber Attack, It’s An M&S Cyber Attack

Newscast

BBC

Politics, News

4.4 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, we’re looking at a cyber attack on Marks and Spencer, which started three weeks ago.

The retailer said today that some personal customer information has been taken.

To understand what has been going on, James speaks to Joe Tidy, BBC’s cyber correspondent, and to Ciaran Martin, the founding Chief Executive of the National Cyber Security Centre.

Also, Donald Trump gave a speech in Riyadh where he announced the US-Saudi bond is ‘more powerful than ever’. They’ve signed a $142 billion arms deal. Sarah Smith, North America editor and Americast is there to talk the trip through.

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New episodes released every day. If you're in the UK, for more News and Current Affairs podcasts from the BBC, listen on BBC Sounds: https://bit.ly/3ENLcS1 Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. It was presented by James Cook. It was made by Chris Flynn with Julia Webster and Shiler Mahmoudi. The technical producer was James Piper. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The editor is Sam Bonham.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.8	I was in Marks and Spencer on the Easter weekend, and I went to pay, and it didn't work.
0:10.3	And the manager came over and said, oh, that's odd.
0:12.9	Maybe your card's not.
0:13.7	We'll try again.
0:14.2	And I tried again.
0:15.1	And then the manager got on a WhatsApp group and said, wait a minute, it's not working
0:18.9	in all the stores in the area.
0:22.7	And then it turns out,
0:27.2	I'm pretty sure that that was the moment, or very close to the moment, that a cyber attack against the giant British retailer started. And something called Dragon Force, we now learn,
0:33.7	is involved. And today, the company has told us for the first time that personal customer
0:38.2	data was stolen in that hack, which I suppose slightly worries to be. My card was in the
0:43.3	machine at the time. So the question is, who is behind these attacks? What do they want? What is
0:47.7	Dragon Force? And we're going to try to answer those questions. We will answer those questions
0:51.6	on this episode of Newscast. Newscast from the BBC.
0:56.5	He has just compared me to the fat controller.
0:59.5	Did I say that? I can't believe I said that.
1:02.3	Next question?
1:03.1	This is R for the benefit of Earth.
1:05.7	I'm not personally a huge Sabrina Carpenter fan.
1:08.6	I don't think I'm being rude.
1:10.1	I like landscapes.
	...

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