New hacking risk identified

THE growing threat posed by computer hackers was vividly illustrated when a group named Anonymous released details of a telephone call between police leaders in Britain, and their FBI counterparts in America, which was discussing this very issue and the likelihood of future arrests.

It is re-enforced by a recent admission that the CIA, the heartbeat of American and global counter-terrorism intelligence, comes under attack several million times a day from cyber warriors – with inherent weaknesses exposed by Gary McKinnon who is now fighting his extradition to the United Sates.

Yet, while the number of attacks on the computer software used by Yorkshire’s local authorities is more modest in comparison, the threat is, nevertheless, the same because of the amount of confidential information contained on servers.

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And while town halls are unlikely to have details pertaining to national security, they do have information that is, potentially, invaluable to fraudsters – details that reveal confidential information about individuals and their identity and which can then be used to make fraudulent transactions.

As such, security breaches, when they do happen, can fall into two categories – the financial or the embarrassing, such as the instance at Craven District Council in 2010 after emails containing confidential information about senior councillors was published on a website.

Certainly computers are not fool-proof. But nor are individuals – public confidence in Gordon Brown’s government started to evaporate when two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 went missing from the HMRC in 2007.

However the public sector cannot afford to be complacent about e-crime. And, at a time when difficult spending decisions are having to be taken, the reality is that local councils and so forth are probably going to have to increase their spending in this field to ensure that they remain one step ahead of cyber warriors. It is a price that they’re going to have to pay if it means safeguarding confidential data about local residents, and preventing a far greater scandal if their software was the victim of a serious security breach.