Salisbury hit by ‘Russian’ cyber attack
COUNCIL officials have been blocked from accessing their emails amid fears that Russian hackers are trying to infiltrate and disrupt the police probe into the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
Wiltshire County Council – which provides all IT services to Wiltshire Police – last night confirmed it had taken the drastic action after seeing ‘increased activity’ from hackers.
Two well-placed sources told The Mail on Sunday the council’s IT system has been ‘probed’ repeatedly since Wednesday.
A spokesman for the National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of the Government’s intelligence agency GCHQ, said it was providing security advice to the council.
A police spokesman said: ‘We have been kept fully informed of the planned maintenance work. There has been no data breach to our force’s IT system.’
One senior council official said: ‘There have been repeated cyber attack attempts since Wednesday.
‘On Friday, our IT people shut down all mobile phone and tablet access to our emails and the suspicion is that we have come under attack from Russian hackers.’ Another source said: ‘It’s a nightmare trying to get work done if you’re not in the office because you can’t access your emails. Various systems have been shut off to protect us from hackers.’
Last year officials at the Houses of Parliament took the same action to block remote access to staff emails when hackers made repeated attempts to guess the passwords of 9,000 accounts.
Wiltshire Council receives £5 million a year to operate and manage all of Wiltshire Police’s IT systems. The deal has been in place since 2012.
A council spokesman said it had been planning to introduce new security measures, but had brought them forward because of the Salisbury attack.