The war in Ukraine has resulted in an increased number of attempted cyber attacks, according to Scarborough Council’s head of cyber security.
Public sector organisations, such as Scarborough Borough Council, have seen an increase in the number of attempted cyber attacks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the council’s head of information and communications technology.
Appearing before the authority’s audit committee, Greg Harper, Scarborough Council’s head of ICT, briefed members on the cyber security risks and prevention methods that were currently in place.
“The reality is that a threat of a cyber attack is ever present, even in the most cyber secure organisations. We are never going to be cyber attack risk-free, we can only reduce them and minimise them,”
said Mr Harper.
He added that the council will “no longer plan for ‘if’ we get a cyber attack, we plan for ‘when’ we get one”, clarifying that there was a difference between a successful attack and an attempted breach.
He said there had been an “upsurge” in the number of attempted cyber attacks on public sector bodies “at the onset of the situation in Ukraine, and many were from Russian domains”, adding that the two could be tied together “with some analysis”.
Scarborough Council is targeted by hundreds of cyber attack attempts on “a daily basis”, according to Mr Harper, but he added that these are “absorbed, repelled, and quarantined”.
Overall, cyber security threats were highlighted on a list of top 10 threats currently faced by the local authority, with cyber risks at number five on the list.
Other serious risks faced by the council, according to director Lisa Dixon, include a failure to recruit and retain adequate levels of staff across departments.
Ms Dixon said that this applied in particular to the council’s hospitality, refuse and parks sectors, though she maintained that this was not exclusively an issue faced by public sector employers:
Mr Harper, head of ICT, also addressed staffing in his department, stating: “We have an extremely, extremely good ICT team. They are in place now but if we were to lose any of them, for whatever reason, then replacing them at this juncture would increase the risks quite significantly.”
He said that retaining his staff was “a day-to-day challenge for all of us”, and though there were many benefits that came from working for the council and the public sector, the challenge of replacing “some of this quality in a shortened period of time would be an extra challenge”:
Mr Harper also revealed that the authority regularly contracts “ethical hackers” to test the internal and external resilience of the council’s IT estate and digital assets.
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