Russian hackers who breached the payroll data of the BBC, British Airways and Boots have issued an ultimatum to the affected employers, threatening to publish the stolen data unless they make contact by 14th June. Data including addresses, national insurance numbers and other personal info…
The attack is now thought to be the brainchild of the infamous Clop cyber gang. Employers have been urged not to pay any ransom demands, and there is still no evidence they’ve accessed bank details. No figure has been given yet for Clop’s demands, either…
Following yesterday’s massive payroll data breach across the BBC, British Airways and Boots, the BBC’s Chief Financial Officer Alan Dickson has now written to all BBC staff to update them on the information obtained in the breach, along with next steps. Fingers now point to a Russian cyber gang as the culprits…
According to Dickson, so far, the following data has been compromised for affected employees:
• BBC ID Number
• Title
• First Name
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• National Insurance Number
• Address line 1
• BBC Email Address
• BBC Employment or Engagement Start Date
• BBC Employment or Engagement End Date
Dickson assures that there is no evidence – yet – that the info has been exploited, nor have bank account details been compromised “at this stage“. They’ve also been assured this attack won’t affect June payroll. Huw Edwards’ paycheque is safe…
Read Dickson’s full email below:
Defending Liz Truss’s phone hacking by the Russians, this morning food minister Mark Spencer told Sky News:
“We all talk on personal phones, don’t we, you know I ring my wife, maybe there’s some little man in China listening to my conversations between me and my wife.”
Guido hopes the ‘little man in China’ enjoys tuning in to No. 10’s incoming bollocking of Mark for that particular phrasing…
Parliament’s Digital Services Cyber Security team have this morning informed civil servants who work on Parliamentary Select Committees that a new threat to parliamentary accounts has been identified- from Extinction Rebellion. As if Russia and China weren’t enough, eco-nutters are now posing a domestic threat too…
Account holders have been advised in an email titled “Cyber security threat this weekend” to change passwords if their teams have seen personnel changes, review who has access to accounts, watch out for suspicious content being posted this weekend, and set stronger passwords if they have not already. Time the Home Office takes stronger action against an organisation that increasingly deploys what look more like terrorist tactics than legitimate protest…
Read the security email in full below…
Yesterday ICTS installed a new cyber-security firewall in Downing Street. As a consequence this was the blank white computer screen which greeted the occupants of Number 10 when they logged on to their favourite source of political news and gossip. A very senior Downing Street source ordered it was fixed immediately…
Last night Michael Crick spotted Labour’s centralised candidate leaflet generator had been failing for some hours, preventing PPCs from sorting out their election literature. The error message last night was:
Today was the deadline for Labour CLPs to get their freepost printing done. Could it be that a last-minute scramble has overwhelmed Labour’s servers? Overnight this has somehow mutated into a “sophisticated and large-scale cyber attack” on its digital platforms. True a lot of people logging on can seem like a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack or it could just be a lot of people trying to log on before the deadline. Guido is betting on the latter…
Labour have just put out a press release claiming:
Yesterday afternoon our security systems identified that, in a very short period of time, there were large-scale and sophisticated attacks on Labour Party platforms which had the intention of taking our systems entirely offline. Every single one of these attempts failed due to our robust security systems and the integrity of all our platforms and data was maintained.
From the party that wants to nationalise Greggs, comes ‘we can’t run a centrally operated leaflet making website effectively’. Bets on how long it takes for them to blame Russia…
UPDATE: The National Cyber Security Centre says meh…
I understand this has not been recorded as a Category 6 attack by NCSC, the lowest level of incident the cybersecurity services respond to
— Rowland Manthorpe (@rowlsmanthorpe) November 12, 2019
UPDATE II: Seven Labour incumbent candidates, plus Paul Mason, have now claimed this attack was caused by foreign interference despite the NCSC effectively rejecting such a conspiracy
