Cyber hackers are targeting the council's systems at a rate of '10,000 a day', leading to threats to its software and systems by higher-ups. It has been agreed by councillors in Oldham that they will spend £682,000 on acquiring a ‘modern data protection service’ which will ensure the privacy of financial information as well as the personal information of thousands of citizens, in order to protect the data they are responsible for guarding.
According to officers, at the moment, because of the current system in place the backup data is not protected against malicious damage or the cloud-based services are not protected from malicious intrusion. In light of this, the council has decided that it is necessary to move all of its data and backup requirements over to the Rubrik Air Gap system and to utilize it for its data recovery and backup.
As stated in the report to the cabinet, the purpose of the decision was to ensure that both services and data will be protected against loss, which is essential in both disaster recovery scenarios as well as against accidental deletion, corruption, or other errors that could lead to information loss.
According to the survey, three-fourths of councils (75 per cent) stated that they have been targeted by phishing attacks as this is the most common type of cyberattack against them, with the majority stating that it was the most common form of attack they have been targeted by.
It can be noted that Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS) were the second most common attack type - ranking as the most serious threat for six per cent of councils this year - which attempted to disrupt web traffic or services by overwhelming servers.
With the increased digitalization driven by the pandemic, both the public and private sectors have been affected by the prevalence of cybercrime, which is being exacerbated by the increasing prevalence of cybercrime.
A survey by Gallagher, an insurance company, shows that 15% of UK business owners rate cybercrime as one of the biggest risks to their business, and specifically that the post-pandemic reliance on technology has exacerbated the problem.
There were eight months of interruption caused by the 2020 cyber attack on that local authority, as reported earlier this year by the leader of that local authority at a parliamentary committee.
There is a type of malware known as ransomware that encrypts files and data in a way that prevents anyone from accessing those files without paying a ransom to the criminal group who has authorized the attack.
Data that is stolen by an attacker may also be threatened with being leaked by the attacker.
During the meeting, councillor Abdul Jabbar, cabinet member for finance and corporate resources, addressed the attendees with the following remarks: "We receive more than 10,000 attacks daily on our systems as a result of cyber attacks."
