How has Nottinghamshire Council been dealing with the rise in cyberattacks?
Digital PR agency Reboot Online submitted an FOI to Nottinghamshire County Council and requested the total number of successful cyber-attacks, a breakdown by category and the total number of attempted attacks across the past five years.
Reboot Online uncovered that since 2020, there have been 12,828 attempted attacks on Nottinghamshire County Council. From 2023 - 2024, there was an 83% increase in the number of attacks. In 2024, they detected and blocked more than 12 cyberattack attempts every day.
Despite the huge number of attempts, the council proudly reports zero successful cyberattacks since 2020 due to their effective cybersecurity measures. Therefore, the council could not provide a detailed category breakdown of the attacks.
In 2022, Nottinghamshire County Council teams stopped two separate attempts involving criminals attempting to steal a total of £527,000.
A spokesman for the council previously explained: “This is a classic example of cybercrime or a cyber attack, what they attempted to do was pretend to be someone who wanted to change bank accounts to make a payment to a different payee – i.e. themselves.
“But we have systems in place to double check that is actually the right person or organisation before any changes are made, and then indeed to alert both the bank and ourselves before it takes place.”