Julia Gregory reports: Town Hall number-crunchers say a cyber attack in October 2020 cost the council £12.2m in the last financial year. This includes more than £444,000 spent on IT consultancy, £152,000 on recovery of the Mosaic systems used for social care data, and £572,000 on the housing register in the last financial year. The…
Author: Dissent
A Data Breach Is Bad, But Disclosing Too Much Could be Worse
Adam Stone reports: When state and local IT systems get breached, there’s a balancing act to be struck. How much can and should the public be told? Some advocates of transparency and accountability say anything that happens in the public realm ought to be public knowledge. On the opposite extreme, some IT leaders worry that…
Bulgarian Government Hit By Cyberattack Blamed On Russian Hacking Group
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports: The websites of the Bulgarian presidency and several other government ministries were the target of a large-scale cyberattack, the Prosecutor-General’s Office said on October 15, blaming Russian hackers. Prosecutor-General Ivan Geshev described it as a “serious problem,” calling it “an attack on the Bulgarian state.” In addition to the president’s…
Tata Power, a top power producer in India, confirms cyberattack
Jagmeet Singh reports: Tata Power, a leading power generation company in India, has confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack. In a brief statement released on Friday, the Mumbai-based company said that the attack impacted some of its IT systems. “The company has taken steps to retrieve and restore the systems. All critical operational systems…
Woolworths says 2.2m MyDeal customers’ data hacked
Ben Potter and Carrie LaFrenz report: In the third major corporate security breach in as many weeks, Woolworths is scrambling to contact 2.2 million customers of its MyDeal online marketplace arm whose data has been accessed by an unauthorised user using “compromised” credentials, the supermarkets giant said on Friday evening. […] Of the 2.2 million estimated to…
Authorities name North Korea hacker group, warn of attacks on Japanese crypto assets
The Yomiuri Shimbun reports: The North Korean hacker group Lazarus has conducted cyber-attacks targeting Japanese crypto asset companies, according to the National Police Agency. It is unusual to name a suspected attacker before taking such actions as an arrest, but in this case, authorities have adopted a method called “public attribution,” using it in Japan…