E-mail Attack Locks Down UK Government
June 24, 2017
Shah Sheikh (1294 articles)
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E-mail Attack Locks Down UK Government

The UK parliament e-mail system is currently under lockdown due to attempted cyber-attacks occurred in order to access the accounts of lords, MPs, staff, and aides. “The Houses of Parliament have discovered unauthorized attempts to access parliamentary user accounts,” a parliamentary spokesperson told The Independent. “We have systems in place to protect member and staff accounts and are taking the necessary steps to protect our systems.”

Anyone who currently isn’t in Westminister cannot have access to the network as it was shut down as part of securing the network. Moreover, an e-mail was sent to everyone who is currently using a parliament e-mail address warning them of unusual activity and that there is evidence of an attempted cyber-attack. According to reports, the attackers were targeting those with weak passwords leading the security team in response to make changes such as curbs on remote access and mobile phone accounts to prevent giving access to the attackers.

We can learn from this that not only should we tell people to use weak passwords, but need to ensure that our systems prevent their usage as high level executives are most likely to get targeted by attacks.

Source: info security