Firstly, it is the news related to a Cyber Attack on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council which is trending on Google. On February 8th, 2020 a ransomware attack targeted the servers of the Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council disrupting the servers from the past three weeks.
Council Leader Mary Lanigan says that the IT staff has been working 24/7 to bring back essential services online since then and have partially succeeded in doing so. The attack is reported to have impacted the children who were anxiously waiting for their join in the secondary schools nearby which is scheduled to take place on National Offer Day to be held on March 2nd, 2020.
News is out that it would take several months for the council to restore the services on a complete note and would cost them anything between £11m to £19m as the costs to restore the services to normalcy.
What’s engrossing in this cyber attack saga is that the council has allotted a total of only £7.4m out of an annual budget of £279 million for an IT grant for the year 2020-21.
So, it will be interesting to find on how the Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council will make it recover costs.
In other interesting news related to cyberattacks, a Rwandan Government data center is reported to have been cyber-attacked by hacking group downing several servers belonging to government as well as private entities.
The impact is said to have disrupted most government websites which include the President’s website and that of the state’s military.
According to a source from news website Taarifa Rwanda, the recent attack happens to be second in the history of Rwanda as in the year 2016, hacktivists from the World Hacker Team targeted data centers operating across the region by infiltrating the network of Broadband Systems Corporation and stealing sensitive information like email accounts, passwords, and phone numbers and dumping them online.
