Oldham Council facing 10,000 cyber attacks a day, report says

Oldham Council said upgrading systems to protect against ransomware attacks would be "money well spent"

A council is to spend £682,000 on computer upgrades after bosses said they were fighting off 10,000 cyber attacks a day.

Members of Oldham Council's cabinet said they would use the money to buy a "modern data protection service".

Their current system has no ability to protect backup data against "malicious damage" or protect services held in the Cloud, officers said.

Councillor Elaine Taylor said it would be "money well spent".

Buying the system "critical for both disaster recovery scenarios" and to protect against accidental deletion, corruption and other scenarios, a council report said.

It follows high-profile malware attacks on other organisations, including the University of Manchester and Redcar and Cleveland Council, who told a parliamentary committee earlier this year the 2020 cyber attack cost them £7m, and caused a "catastrophic" eight months of disruption.

'Personal information'

Ransomware is type of a malware that prevents access to devices and data, with a criminal group then demanding a ransom for decrypting the information.

Attackers may also threaten to leak the data they steal, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

Speaking at the council meeting, cabinet member for finance and corporate resources, councillor Abdul Jabbar said: "On a daily basis we get 10,000 attacks on our system.

"We've got all the known safety measures in place to protect our IT systems and hopefully that will continue. It will mean all the services can continue with delivering the services that our residents need.

"We hold lots of financial information, lots of personal information about many, many thousands of our customers and we take it extremely seriously."

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