The British Council has been hit with two successful ransomware attacks over the past five years, according to data obtained by Parliament Street through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

The think tank said that the attacks led to 12 days of downtime where its systems were either offline or unusable.

The first incident caused five days of downtime in the first attack and seven days in the second attack. No ransom was paid in either incident.

In addition, there were a further six unsuccessful ransomware attacks on The British Council during same period in which ransomware was detected and blocked or where malware was not deployed on the endpoint.

The news comes days after the UK government launched its new national cyber strategy. [link]

“Every organisation is vulnerable to ransomware attacks,” said security specialist Edward Blake, area vice president EMEA, Absolute Software. “A large portion of time and resources are spent trying to prevent them, but it is a matter of when they happen, not if they happen, and it is on organisations and businesses to put in place effective cyber security measures to deal with ransomware attacks when, not if, they occur.”

Blake added: “Zero Trust protocols are one of the most effective methods to preventing bad actors, which may already have access to a system, from infecting other aspects of the network, or moving laterally through a system to seize even more data.”

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