A few days ago, IT systems and services at Leicester City Council stopped working. Councillors were not told the cause. (Link: https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/systems-outage-leicester-city-council-9151322)
At 7pm this Friday, they tweeted it is a "cyber incident". Services are still offline.
I've checked and every network service at Leicester City Council's network border is offline, including Citrix Netscaler and Cisco AnyConnect VPN.
There's a high chance it's ransomware.
Confirmed it is a ransomware group.
My take would be the ransomware operator has made a mistake here as Leicester council have about 0% chance of being able to afford to pay - a year ago they described their existing budget as having a "near impossible cliff edge" to central government and they haven't received additional funding since - so the operator shoved the group's head into a beehive, the ransomware group should probably help them out.
Leicester City Council say a UK government minister is pressuring them not to disclose what happened (it’s ransomware). https://therecord.media/leicester-uk-cyberattack-local-council
The UK government really needs a radical rethink on ransomware IMHO. If you can’t even say the word you can’t manage the problem.
Leicester City Council remains offline, from my automated monitoring, from their ransomware incident. A person in the council tells me they’ve been told not to admit it is ransomware by central government.
The BBC reports they expect to return mid week. My take - very unlikely they will get back online mid week.
You may be surprised to know Leicester City Council have not returned mid-week, and are presently in “maintenance”.
Leicester City Council ransomware incident rumbles on, having civil society impacts.
UK gov pretending it isn’t ransomware still.
Leicester City Council say it will be at least another two weeks until they restore IT services after ransomware incident (sorry, cyber incident)
