The UK government was reportedly bombarded with billions of phishing emails last year, with large numbers of questionable and fraudulent links being clicked on by staff. Comparitech recently published a report on these fraudulent emails and got responses in the sort of freedom of information requests from 260 government agencies.
According to Comparitech, 764,331 government employees got a total of 2.7 billion fraudulent emails, averaging 2,399 per employee. However, this indicates that the emails were most likely flagged as malicious and prohibited by the relevant government agency.
In 2021, personnel opened 0.32 percent of malicious emails on average, with 0.67 percent of these events resulting in employees clicking on potentially dangerous links, as per research.
According to Comparitech, this might suggest some UK government employees clicked on 57,736 questionable links last year. The firm reiterated whether any FOI responses have been unclear - were ignored to avoid overestimating this amount.
357 million fraudulent emails were received by NHS Digital's 3,996 employees, amounting to 89,353 mails per employee. Other essential infrastructure services, such as railway supplier Network Rail Limited, received 223 million malicious emails, or 5,033 emails per employee, while tax authority HM Revenue & Customs received 27.9 million spam emails, or 415 emails per employee.
In other cases, the researchers' attempts to better grasp the government's ransomware threat were hampered by respondents' lack of transparency. "One government department reported in 2021 it had identified 97 data theft over just 30 days. Seventy-one government agencies were also glad to announce why they had not been hit by ransomware in 2021 the remaining 187 didn't say whether or not they had. In 2021, only two government agencies disclosed it had been the victims of a successful ransomware attack," said Paul Bischoff of Comparitech.
