Just for perspective….
Ben Bland reports:
More than 25,000 cyber attacks were carried out against Essex County Council in the past year, it has emerged.
It is thought those carrying out the attacks were attempting to access the personal details of people living in Essex, which are held by the authority.
The council refused to state whether any of the attempts were successful.
The council said it spent more than £500,000 each year employing a team of six people to protect its systems.
Read more on BBC.
They may refuse to say, but looking at what we included last year in DataLossDB.org:
- Sensitive county information was found in a disused building in August 2012.
- In October, we learned that hundreds of vulnerable people’s names, addresses and financial information were sent from the council’s Adults Health and Community Wellbeing Department to an external computer, and
- In October, we also learned that 40 volunteers’ personal details contained in a spreadsheet were accidentally sent to those same 40 people.
All insider breaches, and no reports of hacks. Hopefully some organization will seek more information from the council under freedom of information requests.