Security in place for Russian threat

South Holland District Council says it is ready to withstand a possible cyber attack from Russia.

The threat of such an attack is the only “High Risk” identified by the council in its quarterly risk report to the authority’s Governance and Audit Committee which met on Thursday, July 26.

To combat the risk, the report states that the council now has “a dedicated security analyst role within the service as well as the implementation of business approved ICT maintenance windows which allows the ICT service to implement necessary security patches and updates.”

At the meeting councillor Chris Brewis asked officers: “Are we really feeling confident about our firewalls?. Should we be doing more to strengthen them?”

The executive director for commercialisation, Christine Marshall, explained the risk of hacking from Russia was something central government had warned all local authorities about.

“We’ve now got mitigation in place that’s going to stop hackers,” she said. “If we did have a breach there would be a total shut down so the concern would be about how we recovered our information.

“We’re now in a lot better place in terms of recovery.”

The committee also asked about the council’s policy of making frequent back-ups of its data. Mrs Marshall confirmed that they did indeed back-up data including eventually moving some versions of the back-ups to another location.