When did the attack surface?

Rob Miller first learned there was a problem on a Sunday morning in mid-October 2020. The databases and IT systems at Hackney Council in East London suffered from outrages. During the time, the UK was moving towards a lethal wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, with millions living with Covid-19 restrictions, and daily life was greatly disturbed. Bot for Miller, who's a strategic director at the public authority, the path ahead was full of challenges. By the time it was lunch, it was clear that the issue was more than technical stuff. 

What did the ransomware impact?

Soon afterward, the leaders of Hackney Council- one of London's 32 local authorities that deals with the lives of over 250,000 people- disclosed that it suffered a cyberattack. Threat actors had planted ransomware that greatly injured its systems, affecting the council's efficiency to take care of people who rely on it. The Pysa ransomware gang afterward took responsibility for the cyberattack, and after some time, claimed to publish stolen data from the council.

Current Situation

Presently, more than two years later, Hackney Council is still involved with the damage of the ransomware attack. For almost a year, various council services were out of service. Vital council systems- comprising social care services and housing benefit payments, needed to be fixed. While the services are on track now and running smoothly, parts of the council are still not able to work as they used to before the attack.

The attack on Hackney points out not only for its severity but also for the amount of time the organization took to heal and help affected people. 

Ransom Demands

Among the number of services Hackney Council provides are social and children's care benefits paid to people needing financial help, public housing, and waste collection. Many of these services are running via in-house technical systems and services. In various ways, they can work as a crucial infrastructure, making the Hackney Council no different from energy providers and hospitals. 

“The attacks against public sector organizations, like local councils, schools, or universities, are quite powerful,l. It’s not like the energy grids going down or like a water supply being disrupted … but it’s things that are crucial to the day-to-day existence," said Jamie MacColl, a cybersecurity and threat researcher at the RUSI think tank who is researching the societal impact of ransomware.

All the systems hosted on Hackney were affected. Lisa Stidle, the data and insight manager at Hackney Council said "most of our data and our IT systems that were creating that data were not available, which really had a devastating impact on the services we were able to provide, but the work that we do as well."