Her Majesty’s Treasury, the UK government department answerable for the country’s financial policy, has been hit by almost five million destructive email assaults in the previous three years, according to official figures.
A Freedom of Information (FoI) request submitted by the think tank Parliament Street revealed that 4,870,389 phishing, malware and spam emails concentrating on HM Treasury were effectively blocked in this period.
This comprised 1,271,207 malicious email attacks from October 2018 to September 2019, 1,918,944 between October 2019 to September 2020, and 1,680 from October 2020 to September 2021.
The information comes as Chancellor Rishi Sunak prepares to ship the United Kingdom govt’s annual budget, which is anticipated to incorporate pledges around cybersecurity, such as funding to minimize the digital skills gap.
The figures highlight the escalating determination of threat actors to access and steal confidential government information. Earlier this week, Parliament Street disclosed that more than 126 million malicious emails had been fired at House of Commons inboxes this year, a 358% increase at the overall figure for 2020. However, there was no specific data on how many threats slipped past email filters over this period.
The number of malicious emails blocked by HoC filters in 2018 was 15.7 million, which surged to nearly 30.3 million in 2019, but then dropped again to almost 28 million in 2020. With 126.4 million malicious emails recorded up to September this year, Parliament Street believes the total for 2021 could reach as high as 150 million.
“The ever-present cyber threat facing public sector organizations is not going to disappear any time soon. In fact, recent trends indicate that cyber-attacks are likely to become more sophisticated, and criminals will find new ways to breach systems, disrupt apps and websites, and steal sensitive data,” Chris Ross, SVP International for Barracuda Networks, said.
“This is why it is imperative the organizations defend themselves from all angles, with web application firewalls, to protect cloud infrastructure and network, email inbox defense software, to help defend against the onslaught of phishing attacks targeting employees, and a third-party data backup solution, to protect data and organizations against the growing ransomware threat,” he added.
