Alice Fenton has spoken out after being left “in limbo” regarding her property purchase.
She is one of the many homebuyers who are anxiously awaiting the fate of the cyber attacks targeting law firms.
Awaiting her completion date, she was told by her solicitors that some documents needed to finish the sale process were “inaccessible” due to the incident.
Reports suggest that somewhere between 80 and 200 law firms may have been impacted by the cyber breach.
CTS was targeted by hackers last Wednesday in an outage that has led to its systems being down for almost a week and throwing thousands of deals into doubt.
Ms Fenton said her solicitors informed her on Monday that the firm had been affected by the impact of the cyber-attack on CTS, meaning her family is unable to currently complete the purchase of a property in south east London.
The 35-year-old said her main concern was the fact her mortgage offer is set to expire on 11 December.
She told the BBC: “If we don’t complete before 11 December our mortgage interest rate will jump from three percent to more than five percent which would cost us hundreds of pounds more a month.”
The regulator for property lawyers, CLC, has confirmed that the conveyancing sector is currently experiencing some disruption to transactions as a result of the cyber breach.
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Charlotte Barry, a first-time buyer who lives in Pershore, Worcestershire, said that conveyancer Talbots Law failed to inform her she would be unable to complete on her new house after its systems were shut off in the attack.
She said she only learned of the outage on X, formerly Twitter, after initially not receiving “any information at all” from the firm as to why her purchase had been delayed.
Ms Barry told The Telegraph: “They just said their services were down, which I thought was their internet. I outright asked my solicitors what’s happening and they wouldn’t explain.”
The 29-year-old planning consultant said she then contacted her bank to discover her mortgage application had not been finalised by Talbots and was told it would not be possible to do so before Friday next week when she is due to complete.
Together with her partner and step daughter, the family had been looking forward to spending their first Christmas in their new house, but now fear they will not be able to move in before a tenancy for their current rented home ends.
“I’m very concerned. Our tenancy runs out on December 17 and I’m not sure what I’m going to do if we don’t get the house,” said Ms Barry.
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CTS last posted an update on its website, and on X, on Friday, saying the outage was caused by a “cyber-incident” and that it was working with a “leading global cyber forensics firm to help us with an urgent investigation into the incident and to assist us in service restoration”.
It said it was “unable to give a precise timeline for full restoration” of its services and has given no detail on the scale of the problem and whether people impacted will be compensated.
CTS provides cloud space and IT systems such as emails for firms including legal companies.
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