Hackers are targeting UK retailers and businesses are feeling it in their profits. Good morning. This is the Marketplace Morning Report and we're live from the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. So here in the UK, big retailers have been dealing with a curious case of hacking. One of them, Marks and Spencer, also known as M&S, estimates the distribution could cost at about $400 million.

The BBC's cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, has been following this story.

Hi, Joe.

Hello.

Joe, this is a crazy story.

Can you just start from the beginning for us?

Yeah, so it was over around Easter time when we heard that this supermarket chain, this giant

of the high street in the UK called Marks and Spencer, was involved in some sort of cyber

incident and slowly that has got worse and worse and worse.

And it turns out that MNS, although they're not saying it, they have been hit by what's

called a ransomware attack, which means that hackers have broken into the company's system, stolen a load of

data from employees and customers, and then scrambled those systems to make them unusable

for M&S. And we are seeing the fallout of that with empty shelves in some stores. The company

cannot take any online orders at all. And now we learn today that the cyber attack and, of course,

the incident response and the damage and the loss of earnings they've incurred from that

is going to cost about $400 million. And also we hear from the UK's National Crime Agency,

the equivalent of the FBI, that they are looking squarely in their investigations at a very unique and unusual

area of the cybercrime ecosystem, which is dominated by young English-speaking US and UK hackers.

They're known as scattered spider.

The question that keeps coming up for me is why, why would they do this?

Well, it's money. Almost all cybercrime is about money.

The slight interest here, of course, is with Scattered Spider, this group of young, in some cases

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