London: Brent and Merton councils have disclosed that they were struck by a combined five successful ransomware attacks since 2016 amidst rising ransomware threats in the United Kingdom.
The information, contained in the Digital Government: A Secret Future report by the Parliament Street think tank, revealed the number of successful ransomware attacks, the downtime caused, and details of the ransom, over the past five years, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOI).
In total, the two London councils were hit by a combined five successful ransomware attacks, with Merton Council struck by three successful attacks during the period, and Brent Council facing two successful attacks.
Merton Council, based in South London, disclosed that they did not pay the ransom for any of the incidents and that only one of the attacks resulted in downtime where their systems went offline.
A spokesperson for Merton Council said: “This was due to the Kaseya attack on our hosted environment and resulted in 3 days of some services being disrupted whilst we restored and verified the integrity of the data.”
Meanwhile, Brent Council, in West London, reported to Parliament Street researchers that they did not pay the ransom for either of the two successful ransomware attacks and that they faced “minimal” downtime whilst restoring data from their backup systems.
The first incident saw a selection of council filed encrypted, with the second incident, two years later, also resulting in council files being encrypted.
Ben Johnson, Director at Gigamon, said: “Ransomware has recently been identified as one of the greatest threats to the UK public and private sector and has evolved substantially in recent years. Such attacks creep into an organisation, paralysing the IT systems and forcing decision-makers to pay a hefty sum to regain control of their data.
“With cyber crime on the rise and government departments being seen as top targets for sophisticated cyber criminals, ensuring complete visibility into network traffic to understand what’s happening and when, should be the new normal for any organisation tasked with overseeing crucial data.
“Imagine, for example, if such an attack took place in a hospital, where vital information about medication, treatment and operations were hijacked, the consequences could cost lives.
“The reality is that ransomware relies on blind spots in your network and you need to have full visibility of your infrastructure be it physical, virtual or hybrid cloud and to do this cost effectively optimising the security and networking tools you already have.”