Gloucester Council IT systems are down, with serious issues to their internal systems and services, and the cyber-attack has been linked to Russian hackers. In response to this incident, Dan Davies, CTO at Maintel – the cyber security enabler – shares his thoughts.
Dan Davies comments:
“With the Hackney Borough Council breach still fresh in our minds, the recent hack of Gloucester City Council acts as yet another reminder that government bodies remain high on hackers hit list. The huge amounts of high-value personal and financial data held by local authorities makes them obvious targets.
“While we don’t know the particulars of the Gloucester City Council breach, it is understood that the source may have been from an email. Cyber criminals are continuously probing and looking for weaknesses and it only takes a single vulnerability to gain access. Therefore, modernising IT infrastructure and training staff on the basics of cyber security must be a priority if similar breaches are to be avoided.
“Government bodies look to robust IT systems with the latest security systems to tackle the growing threat from malicious actors. With the increase in IoT appliances coming onto the now ubiquitous borderless networks, the attraction for hackers to attack will continue to grow, and a priority for security teams will be to reduce the time to detect, contain and mitigate breaches. This is a key strategy given those trying to gain access are now very skilled in delivering multi-layered attacks using diversion techniques. The only way to go about this is by regularly scanning your environments for vulnerabilities, applying emerging technologies like predictive analytics with techniques such as machine learning and modelling as additional layers of the already complex security stack. Where the skills don’t exist in-house to handle all of this, or the budget doesn’t exist to deploy the best tools, people and process, look for a strong Managed Cyber Security Service partner to work with. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a matter of if you’ll be attacked, but when. So, it pays to be prepared.”
