A 158-year-old transport business in the UK is shuttering its doors after a weak password from one of its employees led to a costly ransomware attack.
Most companies don’t realize the importance of cybersecurity until it’s too late. While these security measures seem innocuous in the moment, the reality is that a breach can cost businesses millions of dollars in damages.
Many businesses can’t endure those kinds of losses, which can lead to layoffs, fines, and yes, even the shutting down of a business that’s been around for more than a century.
KNP Shuts Down After Ransomware Attack
KNP was a UK-based transportation company that had been in operation for 158 years. It employed 700 people and owned 500 trucks that had become a staple of the Northamptonshire roads on which they operated.
Unfortunately, the company was hit with a ransomware attack that saw the hackers demanding £5 million in payment to release their stolen data.
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“If you’re reading this it means the internal infrastructure of your company is fully or partially dead… Let’s keep all the tears and resentment to ourselves and try to build a constructive dialogue.” – ransom note from hackers
KNP simply wasn’t a big enough company to endure this kind of financial burden and was forced to shut down, putting all of those employees out of work and closing the door on a longstanding institution in the UK.
How Was KNP Breached?
This is arguably the saddest part of the story. KNP wasn’t breached because of an advanced hacking scheme or an elaborate phishing scam. KNP was breached because one of its employees had a password that was so weak and ineffective that the hackers in question were able to simply guess it to gain access to the company’s system.
Once they were in, the hackers simply encrypted all the data, making it impossible to access anything associated with KNP unless the ransom was paid, an unfortunately common occurence in the online world in 2025.
“They’re just constantly finding organisations on a bad day and then taking advantage of them.” – an anonymous National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) official
How to Protect Your Business
Cybersecurity threats are getting pretty advanced in 2025. While some hackers are simply guessing weak passwords to gain access to sensitive systems, there are plenty of advanced techniques that employ AI technology that are far harder to recognize than they used to be.
However, those advancements aren’t an excuse to do nothing. The reality is that there are plenty of methods, strategies, and innovations that can help you keep your company safe, and you absolutely need to make an effort to utilize them before it’s too late.
“We need organisations to take steps to secure their systems, to secure their businesses.” – Richard Horne, CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)
As for what you can actually do, education is the first place to start, especially because many of these vulnerabilities lie within your staff, as opposed to your system. Phishing scams, in particular, are getting more advanced with the development of AI, but if your team knows what to look for, you can stop these ransomware scams at the source.
