Tomas Kirnak
CEO, NetCore j.s.a. (Unimus)
From essential public services to national defence, cyberattacks are shifting from personal devices and into the networks and infrastructure that run Britain.
In 2017, the NHS shut down for a week. Thousands of computers stopped working, and 19,000 appointments were cancelled.1This incident cost the NHS an estimated £92 million.1
In 2024, the Ministry of Defence was breached, and information on 272,000 current and former military personnel was compromised.2 Last year, the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack was one of the largest economic cyber incidents in UK history. Additionally, thousands of suppliers and downstream businesses were affected, with an estimated £1.9 billion in economic impact across supply chains.3
Due to the benefits of digitalisation, everything, from manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, logistics and energy, is becoming an IT system. And all those ‘IT’ systems need more IT infrastructure to talk to more systems, and to humans using them. Behind these systems exists a vast net of IT infrastructure. Networks, servers, data storage and industrial supervisory systems. While past cyberattacks focused largely on computers and user-facing systems, attacks today focus on infrastructure.
Breaching an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) network router means you can spy on the traffic of thousands of households. Infiltrating the firewall that protects your company’s or the Government’s network means you can do anything with the data passing through that firewall. When you have control over the actual infrastructure (the network) carrying the data, you can copy, modify or delete any data in-transit without a trace.
Due to the benefits of digitalisation, everything, from manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, logistics and energy, is becoming an IT system
Cyberattacks are growing in scale
In 2017, a cyberattack toolkit called Vault7 leaked on WikiLeaks. It contained a sizable set of tools to attack widely deployed network equipment from many device manufacturers. More than 500,000 networks were exploited globally.4
“We saw the impact in real time. Our software (Unimus) flagged changes to vulnerable network equipment across Internet Providers, company networks and public sector organisations,” notes Tomas Kirnak, CEO, Netcore j.s.a. (Unimus).
Last month, Cisco (one of the largest network equipment manufacturers) reported a vulnerability with the highest possible severity score across a range of its networking products. Anyone could take over a device in just a few minutes.
“If you’re managing hundreds or thousands of network devices, you need tools to audit the network infrastructure at scale. You need to monitor compliance with security standards and monitor for vulnerable firmware — exactly what Unimus does across the infrastructure,” Kirnak concludes.
[1] NHE. (2018). WannaCry cyber-attack cost the NHS £92m after 19,000 appointments were cancelled. https://tinyurl.com/sw38s4we.
[2] UK Parliament. (2024). Defence Personnel Data Breach. https://tinyurl.com/27uswa5h.
[3] The Guardian. (2025). Jaguar Land Rover hack has cost UK economy £1.9bn, experts say. https://tinyurl.com/ymkaccem.
[4] Loshin, P. (2018). VPNFilter malware infects 500,000 devices for massive Russian botnet. https://tinyurl.com/4c23fj5w.
