‘Thousands’ of sales still in limbo after cyber attack at CTS conveyancing platform

The number of house sales hit by a ‘cyber incident’ at conveyancing tech firm CTS are in the thousands with one leading lender reporting 600 property purchases stuck in limbo following the attack last week.

CTS remains tight lipped about what the problems are or how many vendors are affected, but comments by the Nationwide to the BBC on Friday would suggest that several thousand are involved, with 90 conveyancing firms involved.

The firm’s clients list includes O’Neil Patient, which uses the CTS platform to process 88,000 home sales every year.

Last week CTS released a statement saying it had experienced an outage caused by a ‘cyber incident’ and that “we continue to work around the clock with the assistance of third-party experts.

“Whilst we are confident that we will be able to restore services, we are unable to give a precise timeline for full restoration. We will continue to communicate directly with those of our clients which are impacted by the service outage, providing regular updates on the status of our work to restore services and our investigations into the incident.”

Reinstate

The software firm has revealed that its client services are up and running again but that ‘client environments’, which are the various network connections it operates, are taking longer than expected to reinstate during the final and ‘complex’ process to restore its service fully.

This cyber attack has been crippling for many conveyancers because, without the CTS platform working correctly, they are unable to process key documents that lenders require to release funds in order for sales to complete, leaving many vendors and buyers in limbo.

The BBC’s Money Box programme spoke to one vendor who had been forced to move into temporary rented accommodation after selling her home but being unable to complete on her next one, reporting that she had received no communication from CTS on the status of its system reboot.

The property market was hit by a similar attack in August 2022, albeit on a big council’s property search IT platform, which took more than eight months to fix.