To everyone’s relief in Gloucester, some new information has been released by the Gloucester Council after a “Cyber Incident” on September 4th. In this blog we’ll go over their announcement to shed some light on the situation.
Tewkesbury Borough Council recently had to shut down all their online services after spotting some issues with their IT systems. While it initially seemed like a major incident—much like a serious cyber attack that hit a neighbouring council three years ago—it turns out this was just their systems running some security tests.
Back on September 4, the council quickly jumped into action, declaring a major incident and even believing at first that they might have been targeted by hackers. To make sure vulnerable people still had access to services, they sent staff to different towns and villages throughout the Borough.
Naturally, this was a good course of action to take, if it had been caused by a cyber attack, the online services would need to be shut down. Otherwise, a lot of sensitive information could’ve been stolen.
Thankfully, after further investigation, it was confirmed that no data was lost. The council’s cyber response plan kicked in right away when suspicious activity was detected, and it looks like everything was handled smoothly.
In a statement by the council, they said it’s likely their own systems were testing their security. Talk about advanced security!
Fortunately, not every incident tech is down to a cyber attack, which makes it a lot less dangerous and usually easier to fix. The best way to avoid this from happening in a workplace is simply to have your network and devices monitored, in-house or externally.
This eliminates the risk of unexpected situations like this occurring, as 24/7 monitoring tools like EDR will pick up an issue with the network, typically, before it causes harm to the network.
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