London: British Airways and retailer Boots reported that a cyberattack on Zellis, a payroll service used by hundreds of businesses in Britain, hit their staff members as well. According to the BBC, there was also a data breach.

IAG-owned British Airways claimed it had informed and was supporting affected employees. According to information provided to us, we are one of the businesses affected by the cybersecurity incident at Zellis that involved one of their third-party suppliers, MOVEit," BA said in a statement on Monday.

Boots, a member of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, claimed that some of its employees' personal information was included in the attack. Our provider confirmed that prompt action was taken to shut down the server, according to Boots.In the UK, Boots has over 50,000 employees, compared to 30,000 at British Airways.

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A spokesperson for the BBC stated, "We are aware of a data breach at our third-party supplier, Zellis, and are working closely with them as they urgently investigate the extent of the breach."

"We are abiding by the established reporting procedures and take data security very seriously.

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Experts have connected the attack to a Russian cyber gang known as Clop and believe the group entered through a backdoor in a file transfer programme used by Zellis.

MOVEit, the in question programme, is Progress Software's property.

One day after the creator of the software disclosed that a security flaw had been discovered, US security researchers warned on Thursday that hackers had stolen data from the systems of a number of users of the file transfer tool MOVEit Transferone.

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Names, addresses, and social security numbers were among the information that was compromised, according to the newspaper Daily Telegraph, which broke the initial news of which businesses were impacted