Hackney Council, a local governing authority in London Borough, reportedly fell victim to a cyber attack disrupting IT services accessible to residents from the early hours of Tuesday. It’s clear that the apparent cyber incident was serious as the whole of the servers were down because of the impacted of the attack.
Philip Glanville, the Mayor of the Council confirmed the incident and said that the IT staff along with the law enforcement were working to investigate the incident deeply and they are busy in bringing the front-line digital services back to normalcy as soon as possible.
Residents and businesses are being urged not to put pressure on the call center for minor reasons as the customer care executives are already stressed out.
Highly placed sources report that Hackney Council’s One Account service that provides residents a safe and private platform to access and manage online services was severely impacted with the incident. So, payment of taxes and seeking house benefit services might run slow than usual till a few days. Tenants and those willing to pay charges related to housing repairs are been requested to hold their operations at least till this weekend or till a new update from the council is released.
Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre(NCSC), the cyber arm of GCHQ, has been pressed into service to probe the attack. And an hour ago, forensic experts from the Communities and Local Government and Ministry of Housing have joined them for help.
“We are well aware of the Hackney Borough Council Cyber Attack and need support from organizations and working partners to realize the effect of the incident”, said a spokesperson from NCSC.
Note- Cyber attacks on local government bodies and agencies have increased in the last 2 years. And most of those launched were found to be from the adversary nations like China, Russia, and North Korea.