KNP Logistics had been moving goods across the UK for 158 years. It survived two world wars and half a dozen recessions.
It did not survive a single weak password.
In 2023, the Akira ransomware group guessed an employee’s credentials and encrypted critical systems, and within three months, KNP had ceased trading. Over 700 people lost their jobs. The company was already navigating difficult market conditions, but it was the ransomware attack that made recovery impossible. All it took was a brute-force password guess on a system without multi-factor authentication.
That story should unsettle anyone responsible for security in logistics operations across the UK. According to Dragos’ industrial ransomware analysis, transport and logistics accounted for 77 ransomware incidents in Q2 2025 alone, representing around 12% of all industrial ransomware activity. The sector is a persistent target – and logistics cyber security challenges are specific to how these operations work.
The First Sixty Minutes
The first sign is rarely a ransom note. It’s a sudden, inexplicable silence. Handheld scanners lose their connection to the warehouse management system. Automated sorting conveyors stop mid-cycle. Drivers find the route optimisation app unresponsive. Phone systems go down. Within minutes, the operation has reverted to manual – and manual, in a facility built around wireless connectivity and real-time data, doesn’t mean slow. It means stopped.
What most people don’t realise is that by this point, the attackers have likely been inside the network for months. Modern threat actors sit quietly, mapping systems and exfiltrating data, then detonate at 2am on a Sunday or over a bank holiday when staffing is at its thinnest. A Trend Micro analysis found that even when ransomware only directly infects IT systems, the disruption cascades into OT networks that depend on them. Warehouse IoT devices, RFID systems, and automated picking technology all share infrastructure with corporate IT. When that environment is compromised, the operational floor follows.
The Double Hit
By the second hour, customers can’t track shipments. Booking systems are offline. Drivers are calling the depot because electronic proof-of-delivery has failed. Dispatch teams are working from memory and paper – if they’re working at all. By hour six, your customers’ production lines are waiting for components that aren’t arriving. Contractual penalties are accumulating. To put the scale of disruption in context, a KPMG analysis commissioned by the UK Government (2025) estimated that a systemic cyber incident affecting the UK rail network could cost approximately £1.8 billion per week. For a mid-sized logistics company, in our experience, you’re looking at £1 million or more in the first month alone when you factor in lost business, downtime, and the cost of getting systems back online.
And the encryption is only the first lever. Today’s attackers exfiltrate your data before they lock your systems. Transport data security is compromised twice over – customer records, commercially sensitive contracts, driver and employee information – giving them a second shot at the ransom. Even if your backups work and you can restore operations, the threat of a data leak carries its own set of consequences: ICO investigations, GDPR exposure, and reputational damage that no recovery plan can reverse.
The Insurance Trap
Many organisations assume that cyber insurance will absorb the blow. The reality is more complicated. Insurers typically require forensics on the compromised network before any restoration can begin, which means your existing infrastructure is frozen as evidence. You can’t restore your backups to servers that are being examined – you need new hardware. Now, server lead times can stretch to a month or more.
Then there’s the claims process itself. We’ve seen cases where insurers have mobilised solicitors, PR firms, forensic teams and recovery consultants – racking up costs into the tens of thousands – only to discover a discrepancy in the policyholder’s original disclosure. An antivirus tool that wasn’t installed on every server as declared. A backup configuration that didn’t match the policy application. The claim is denied, and the accumulated costs transfer back to the organisation. The UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill adds further pressure, proposing mandatory incident notification within 24 hours and a full report within 72.
Why Standard Recovery Plans Fall Short
Most IT disaster recovery plans are built around office environments: restore the email server and reconnect the desktops. That sequence reveals a fundamental gap in IT support for logistics, where the priority isn’t email but the warehouse management system, transport management platform, and fleet tracking that keeps vehicles moving. Everyone thinks they’ll be back on their feet in a couple of days. In practice, two to three weeks for basic systems is optimistic, and even a semblance of normality typically takes four to six months. A full return to where you were before the attack can take over a year.
A pattern we see consistently across the 250-plus incidents we’ve worked at Syscomm is this: organisations have the right kit, but it’s not configured properly. Firewalls are in place, but intrusion prevention left unticked, for example, or a security feature that was enabled on some servers but not others. Backups exist but sit on the same network as production systems. Cloud backups are encrypted, but the decryption keys are stored on the very network that gets locked. The technology is there. The gaps are in how it’s set up, and those gaps are what attackers exploit.
What Resilience Looks Like
The reason our retained clients haven’t suffered a recurring catastrophic breach comes down to network segmentation and visibility. When we rebuild after an incident, we design the network so that an intrusion in one segment – a desktop VLAN or a CCTV network – cannot spread to critical systems. And we don’t just block that traffic; we log and alert on it. If a CCTV camera tries to connect to a domain controller at 3am, that’s caught immediately. The worst-case scenario becomes a contained incident on a handful of machines, not a business-ending event.
KNP Logistics failed because a preventable vulnerability met a recovery capability that couldn’t match the speed of the attack. Security in transport and logistics isn’t about having the right technology – it’s about having it configured, segmented, and monitored so that when an intrusion happens, it stays contained.
Every logistics operation in the UK should be asking the same question: if this happened to us tomorrow, would we recover comfortably? If you’re not sure of the answer, our Transport & Logistics Ransomware Resilience Guide [insert link once created] is a good place to start, as it covers the specific supply chain cyber security threats facing your sector and the steps that make the biggest difference. And if you want to know where your gaps are before an attacker finds them, book a resilience assessment. We’ll review your backup architecture, operational dependencies, and response plan against real-world attack scenarios.
