Hackers have sent London councils into emergency procedures, impacting shared IT services and phone lines as authorities attempt to limit the damage.

So far, the authorities impacted are the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), Westminster City Council and London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

RBKC has even encouraged staff to work from home due to the incident.

Hackney council has issued an urgent memo warning staff about phishing scams, after a significant cyber attack in 2020 led to the leaking of 280,000 residents’ data.

RBKC has stated they have found the ’cause’ of the incident, but are not publishing details yet due to the ongoing investigation.

At the point of publication, however, RBKC’s statement updating the public about the hack is offline.

An image of the RBKC website, and a tweet update about the cyber crime.
RBKC’s statement about the hack, but the link to their website is not functional.

There are fears among cyber security experts that there could have been a significant data breach, as councils hold vast amounts of sensitive personal information.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said councils need to be more resilient, but warned that criminals will keep finding ways of infiltrating London’s local authorities. 

This is the latest in a wave of cyber crimes on London, after the Transport for London hack which cost City Hall £39 million, and more recently the Heathrow attack which brought the airport to a standstill and the theft of sensitive data from a chain of nurseries.

With this latest incident, Londoners could quite rightly ask whether the capital is properly protected against cyber criminals.

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