Hack busters

Experts who spring into action when cyber-gangs strike

- Anna Isaac

They call it “stopping the bleeding”: the vital window to prevent an entire database from being ransacked by criminals or a production line grinding to a halt.

When a call comes into the cybersecurity company S-RM, headquartered on Whitechapel High Street in east London, a hacked business or institution may have just minutes to protect themselves.

S-RM, which helped a high-profile retail client recover from a Scattered Spider cyber-attack, has become a quiet, often word-of-mouth, success. Many of its senior workers are multilingual and have a minimal online footprint that reveals scant but impressive CVs suggestive of corporate or government intelligence-based careers.

S-RM now claims the UK’s largest cyber-incident response team. Its first-responder service is comprised of about 150 experts worldwide. In the case of the Scattered Spider victim, which the Guardian understands was not Marks & Spencer or the Coop - two retailers that were attacked in 2025 - a 30-minute Teams call with a retailer became “a 24-hour call with a rotating cast of experts”, said Ted Cowell, the director of S-RM’s cyber business arm.