Last Week, a few news resources went on air to report that an IT meltdown caused in UK courts as a result of a cyber attack launched by one of the adversaries of the nation. But the Ministry of Justice released a press statement today saying that the meltdown was not caused by any cyber incident and instead was caused due to a technical glitch.
Now to those who haven’t aware of the situation, here’s a gist of it. From Monday afternoon last week, 1000’s of computers working across England and Wales stopped working due to the disruption of the central server at the Criminal Bar Association.
As a result of the disruption, the whole digital systems connected to the court data were impacted and that includes the secure email system meant for communication between judges and lawyers to hear trials and pronounce judgments.
The IT meltdown has shown its direct impact on the court trials of the criminal bar association as they have to be adjourned and rescheduled said Chris Henley, the Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association.
High placed sources say that the digital disruption could leave most of the lawyers to go unpaid because there will be no electronic evidence to prove that they have attended the court.
Most of the Barristers were/are not able to access vital court documents due to the fact that the court WiFi and secure emails systems were down since last week.
There is a high probability that the defendants could be set free from prison as the law forbids the cops from detaining the suspects in custody for not more than 48 hours.
In a closing statement, the Ministry of Justice(MoJ) has once again stressed on the fact that result of the IT meltdown was not caused by a cyber attack and there has been no data loss or theft by hackers.
Note- From early 2017, the MoJ UK decided to move all their IT systems to public cloud hosting platforms as they wanted to reduce their hosting costs to 60%- thus saving millions of pounds. So, all tier 1 data is reported to be hosted in the central server room and for tier 2 data needs the Ministry is said to be depending on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure cloud storage platforms.
