On the 27th November Blue Diamond was the victim of a ransomware attack on their Head Office in Guernsey. The attack, known as RYUK, originated from North Korea and encrypted all the files and systems on their network, including their finance system.

As a result all the invoices and payments that were originally processed between the 20th and 27th November have had to be re-processed and that has meant the payment run that was scheduled for 30th November, is now re-scheduled for Friday, 7th December.

Managing Director Alan Roper told GTN Xtra: "Fortunately we were in the process of migrating all our computer software to the cloud where our data was being backed up.

"However our accounting software and data plus Group SharePoint data was still on the attacked server and all the data was encrypted by the ransomware and we were locked out. We were instructed to pay in bitcoins the sum of several hundred thousand pounds and each day we delayed the price goes up!

"Our cloud computing company have reviewed all the data and from Monday we will be accessing our data again via the cloud and our encrypted server will be decommissioned.

"Our Employee HR data was unaffected.

"All Customer loyalty EPOS data was also unaffected as it is held on another server off site and protected by the supplier."