Inside the KNP Breach: The Single Password That Destroyed a 158-Year Empire

For 158 years, KNP kept Britain moving.

Generations of drivers, under the banner of Knights of Old, hauled everything from food to freight, threading through fog, ice, and early dawn deliveries. The company had weathered wars, recessions, and industry shifts. But one ordinary day, the engines went quiet.

It wasn’t a supply chain crisis. It wasn’t fuel costs. It wasn’t even a pandemic.

It was a password.

A single, guessed password is believed to have allowed a ransomware gang to slip inside KNP’s systems, encrypt vital operational data, and paralyze the business. Without access to core systems and unable to pay the estimated £5 million ransom, KNP was forced to shut its doors. 700 people lost their jobs. A 158-year legacy disappeared. All from one weak password.

The KNP breach is a sad story about fragility in the age of SaaS, where one missed detail and one weak link can undo what generations built.

One Password, 700 Jobs

Paul Abbott, a director at KNP, doesn’t see the value in naming the employee whose password was compromised. “Would you want to know if it was you?” he asks.

Would you want to know if it was your weak password that caused a breached?

That haunting question captures the human side of this breach. This wasn’t some careless admin or rogue actor. This was likely a well-meaning employee, doing their job, logging in like they always had, until one day, that weak password became the entry point to collapse.

The breach is the work of the Akira ransomware gang, which didn’t need a zero-day exploit or a brute-force campaign. They simply guessed their way in. From there, they encrypted core systems, disrupted daily operations, and held the company hostage. Because KNP couldn’t pay, 158 years of business came undone.

From the outside, KNP checked the boxes. They followed industry guidance. They carried cyber insurance. But like so many businesses today, they lacked a critical piece that matters in a SaaS-driven world: visibility into who has access, how they’re authenticating, and where weak, reused, or shared passwords put the entire organization at risk. Without knowing where weak credentials were hiding or where security controls were missing, KNP never saw the real threat until it was too late.

KNP’s False Sense of Safety

“The company said its IT complied with industry standards, and it had taken out insurance against cyber-attack.”

Standards won’t save you when your access controls aren’t enforced, password reuse slips unchecked, and no one’s watching how SaaS applications are being used and by whom. Without real-time visibility into SaaS access, password usage, and authentication behavior, risk accumulates quietly. Weak credentials slip through. MFA gets bypassed. Former employees retain access. And all of it stays hidden until someone decides to take advantage.  KNP’s systems may have been compliant on paper, but they weren’t prepared in practice. They missed the drift and risk signals. And that’s how one guessed password unraveled 158 years of operation. Not because the company lacked effort, but because their defenses weren’t built for today’s threat landscape.  

“One guessed password unraveled 158 years of operation. Not because the company lacked effort, but because their defenses weren’t built for today’s threat landscape.”

How SaaS Identity Risk Manifests

SaaS identity risk is not always as obvious as a red alert or failed login attempt. More often, it’s something subtle and persistent.

• Password reuse across personal and corporate SaaS accounts.

• Accounts offboarded in one system but left active in three others.

• Users logging into a critical SaaS app directly, bypassing the company’s SSO provider.

• Shared logins stored in a browser extension and synced across multiple devices.

• Legacy integration tokens still active in five-year-old backup system.

These risks don’t show up in endpoint logs. They don’t trigger traditional SIEM rules. And they’re rarely visible in IAM systems that assume all access flows through a central authority.  

But attackers know they exist. And they use them constantly.

That’s what likely happened at KNP. This wasn’t a sophisticated attack; just a simple identity gap: one user, one SaaS app, one credential outside of IT control.

“They’re [Hackers] just constantly finding organizations on a bad day and then taking advantage of them.” – an anonymous National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) official

The challenge isn’t that organizations don’t care about identity hygiene; it’s that SaaS makes enforcement inconsistent and difficult to manage. Controls are fragmented. Visibility is partial. And enforcement depends on cooperation between security, IT, and identity teams, which often work with incomplete inventories.

Solving this requires more than MFA mandates or password policies. It requires full-context awareness: knowing which apps exist, who has access, how they authenticate, and where controls break down. Without that, small oversights, like a weak password or an unsanctioned login, can quietly escalate behind the scenes. And that’s how a single credential becomes a breach multiplier.

The Post Mortem: What Could Have Made a Difference in the KNP Breach

There’s no silver bullet for stopping ransomware, but some basic identity-centric controls could have dramatically limited the blast radius of the KNP attack or prevented it entirely. Four primary areas stand out:

1. Comprehensive MFA and SSO Coverage: The first, and most obvious, is coverage. It's not enough to enforce MFA or SSO on your crown-jewel applications if users can still log into secondary systems, file-sharing tools, or supply chain platforms with local credentials or credentials reused across multiple environments. That weak password may not have unlocked everything, but it unlocked enough.

2. Broader Credential Hygiene Enforcement: Many companies have policies about password rotation, reuse, and complexity, but no way to enforce or monitor those standards across SaaS. When credentials are stored in browsers, shared in project management tools, or left behind by offboarded employees, you lose control over the very thing attackers target first.

3. Improved Visibility: In the days or weeks leading up to the breach, there may have been signs: a login from an unusual location, a mismatch in authentication method, a SaaS account authenticating directly without SSO. But without real-time identity intelligence across SaaS apps, those signals stay buried.

4. Faster Detection and Response: Even after initial compromise, there’s a window—a short one—where fast action can make all the difference. If access anomalies are detected early, if automation can disable an account, rotate a credential, or kill a suspicious session, the damage can often be contained. But that window closes fast, and most organizations don’t even see it open.

None of these issues are unique to KNP. In fact, they’re common across almost every enterprise running SaaS at scale. That’s why these breaches keep happening— because defenders still lack insight into how SaaS is accessed, by whom, and under what conditions.  

Resilience Starts with Visibility

It’s tempting to treat what happened to KNP as an unfortunate, tragic story about bad luck or a moment of human error. But it’s not.

It’s a preview.

As SaaS adoption accelerates and identity becomes the connective tissue of modern IT, the risks that brought down KNP are multiplying across every enterprise. Weak credentials. Gaps in authentication. Unmonitored access. These are all signals. And the longer they stay hidden, the more power they hand to attackers.

That’s why visibility matters. Not just into which apps are being used, but into how they’re being accessed, where controls are failing, and which credentials are putting the business at risk.

Visibility is only the first step. Grip goes further by combining real-time identity behavior signals, captured directly from the browser, with contextual threat detection and guided remediation. Grip doesn’t just surface risk; it shows you what to do next. From detecting password reuse and unmanaged logins, to mapping blast radius and automating response, Grip turns insight into immediate action. That means organizations don’t just see risk, they can stop it before it escalates.

KNP didn’t fail because they weren’t trying. They failed because they couldn’t see what mattered or act on it fast enough. In a world of expanding SaaS access and rising identity threats, that’s the real risk worth fixing.

SaaS identity risk starts small and moves fast. Grip helps you see it sooner, understand it clearly, and shut it down before it spreads. To learn more, book time with our team.

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