The hostage negotiators of the digital age - The Sunday Story
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cyber-attacks on some of Britain's biggest companies like Marks & Spencer have cost hundreds of millions of pounds. For Jaguar Land Rover, experts estimate the cost to the company and the economy ran to billions. But most of us know almost nothing about what happens behind the scenes in the hours after a hack. Who do you call? In a bank robbery, a negotiator armed with a megaphone might turn up. But what if the loot is bitcoin, and the hostages, data?
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Guest: James Ball, freelance writer, the Times.
Host: Luke Jones.
Producer: Dave Creasey.
Clips: ITV News, CNBC.
Read more: Your company has been hacked. The clock is ticking. Here’s who to call.
Photo: Getty Images.
Get in touch: thestory@thetimes.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Luke Jones. |
| 0:11.2 | A couple of months ago on an otherwise quiet morning in the office, an IT support worker arrives, makes a coffee, turns on her computer, and it goes blank. A message on her screen |
| 0:23.6 | says, you've been hacked. How long would it take an advanced hacker to break into the most |
| 0:30.1 | complex, most powerful AI models that we've built? 30 minutes as it happens. Who do you call |
| 0:37.0 | when your company or organisation has been hacked |
| 0:39.3 | by criminals? If it's a bank robbery, the police arrived, there might be a negotiator |
| 0:47.8 | armed with a big megaphone. But if the perpetrator is lurking deep in the cables and servers |
| 0:53.3 | of an enormous system and |
| 0:55.7 | holding your data hostage, what do you do? |
| 0:58.9 | The story today, the hostage negotiators of the digital age. |
| 1:15.6 | James, can you introduce yourself who you are, what you do? I'm a journalist. I cover a lot of tech issues, a lot of national security stuff. My background has tended to be covering material that comes from hacks, things like the Edward Snowden files, Chelsea Manning's leaks to wiki leaks, and then a whole bunch of offshore leaks. |
| 1:32.7 | So I tend to look at the results of big hacks, but also sometimes the hacks themselves. |
| 1:38.3 | We're going to get into some of the hacks that have happened recently and also some of the people you've been speaking to who actually try and help these organisations manage and get themselves out of all of this. |
| 1:49.2 | Tell me about the British Library hack. |
| 1:50.6 | It was back in, I was it, October 2023 that they first realised something was afoot. |
| 1:59.0 | Someone in IT realised at about 7.30 in the morning on a Saturday that something was a bit wrong. |
| 2:06.7 | And this turned out to be understatement of the century. |
| 2:12.7 | They essentially were just trying to access a bit of a maintenance system, couldn't log in, sort |
| 2:18.9 | of fairly standard IT problem URI might have, but they're supposed to be the tech support, |
| 2:23.9 | you know? That little bit of a bad day escalated and escalated and escalated over the course |
| 2:29.7 | of about an hour. |
| 2:37.3 | When they tried to look at what was wrong with that system, |
... |
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