The States of Guernsey was targeted by a "sophisticated and potentially serious" cyber-attack which sought to overwhelm government email systems.
The phishing temporarily blocked emails from gov.gg accounts to Microsoft and Yahoo email accounts, however these blocks have now been removed.
Colin Vaudin, Chief Information Officer for the States of Guernsey, said the matter had been resolved in under 48 hours.
“Cyber-attacks are, regrettably, now part of the day-to-day security considerations for any organisation, and the ability to prepare, protect and recover from such attacks is crucial," he said.
"This attack was sophisticated and could have had significant operational impact and caused disruption to the ability of the States to communicate with islanders, businesses and other bodies. Whilst I will not comment on the details of the technical measures we have in place and how we reacted to counter this specific attack I would like to reassure the public that we have been constantly improving our cybersecurity measures meaning we’ve been able to quickly tackle what could have been a very serious attack.”
The attack was an attempt at ‘denial of service’ rather than to steal data and there is no evidence that any personal data has been lost.
This is not the first time the States has been targeted in this way, and a previous incident in 2018 had significant impacts on the organisation for several weeks, and smaller impacts that continued for months.
However, Mr Vaudin said the States has "learnt the lessons" of these previous attacks. "We have built relationships with the new National Cyber Security Centre and invested, as part of the contract with Agilisys, in new systems; further enhancements are due to be deployed in 2021 as part of the IT Transformation programme."
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