Lewisham Council, the local authority of Lewisham London Borough based in Catford, UK is said to have become a victim of ransomware cyber attack last week. As per the details available in the news section of the website, an authorized access to the IT storage portal is said to have occurred in April this year. And chances are ripe that the hackers could have accessed financial data related to homelessness project.
The Lewisham council has taken steps to minimize the impact of the attack by contacting over 6K people whose critical data could have been siphoned. The type of data which could have been accessed includes council tax info, housing benefit details, adult social care details along with education details and planning numbers.
Ian Thomas, the Chief Executive of Lewisham Council confirmed the news and apologized to the residents for the incident. However, Mr. Thomas did not accept or deny that the attack was of a ransomware variant.
Sources reporting to our Cybersecurity Insiders say that the attack took place on April 24th, 2018 and the data on an organization’s computer was locked with encryption. The victimized organization was asked to pay a ransom in bitcoins. But the hacker/s failed to specify the amount in numbers and also the address to which it should be sent.
Note- Lewisham Council of London Borough was conducting a homelessness project and details related to the project were being stored on a separate network. It is said that hacker/s got old of the data which was outside the network and started to blackmail. None of the council’s critical data was touched and there is no evidence that the affected data was used/being used on the dark web.
More details are awaited as the investigation on the incident is still in progress, !
