The London Fire Brigade, the fire and rescue service for the UK’s capital, has been targeted by nearly 340,000 cyber-attacks over the past year.
The data was collected under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), and analysed by the Parliament Street think tank, observing the number of blocked email attacks by the department.
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In total, the London Fire Brigade blocked 338,114 cyber attacks over a 12 month period, including malware, phishing, spam and web reputation which is caused by pop-ups on malicious websites.
Spam accounted for the highest proportion of the attacks by a distance, making up 94% of the total threats.
While phishing attacks made up a further 5% as the next most common threat type.
“It’s clear that cyber criminals have no qualms about hacking crucial emergency services and putting lives at risk,” said Derek Mackenzie, CEO of tech recruitment firm Investigo.
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By GlobalData“The harsh reality is that these attacks will continue to grow in terms of volume and sophistication, so beefing up cyber defences is critical for protecting data and keeping malicious parties at bay. Our own research has shown that hiring cyber talent is a major challenge for organisations.”
Overall, the department was able to block 317,438 spam attacks, 17,167 phishing attempts, 3,423 web reputation attacks, and 86 malware attempts.
The London Fire Brigade’s cyber security policy is based on the guidance of the National Cyber Security Centre’s cyber essentials scheme and “10 steps to cyber security”, supported by industry best practice.
Andy Ward, SVP International at Absolute Security, said: “High-profile organisations such as emergency services need an always-on security strategy to stop their IT systems going up in flames, so it’s great to see the London Fire Brigade’s robust approach.
“When abnormal activity is detected, centralised teams need the ability to freeze, or shut off, potentially compromised devices to stop lateral movement across a network and block data leakage.”
This FOI forms part of a wider number of requests to government departments, with the Electoral Commission previously reporting it had blocked 1.2m email attacks over the last year.
