A retired high-ranking officer, Air Marshal Edward Stringer, has revealed that a cyber-attack on the UK’s Defense Academy, mostly caused by Russia, China or North Korea, led to “significant” damage.
The academy is based in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire and it teaches 28,000 military personnel, diplomats and civil servants per year. However, it had to move online due to the pandemic.
Stringer further said that the damage is yet to be corrected. “It could be any of those or it could just be someone trying to find a vulnerability for a ransomware attack that was just, you know, a genuine criminal organisation,” he said.
As per a report by Sky News, no sensitive information was stored on the academy’s network.
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“There were costs to … operational output. There were opportunity costs in what our staff could have been doing when they were having to repair this damage. And what could we be spending the money on that we’ve had to bring forward to rebuild the network? There are not bodies in the streets but there’s still been some damage done,” Stringer said.
“Unusual activity” was first discovered by contractors when they were working for outsourcing company Serco and “alarm bells” started ringing. At that time, he told that there were “external agents on our network who looked like they were there for what looked pretty quickly like nefarious reasons”.
The attack, however, was not successful and there were no breaches beyond the school.
(With inputs from agencies)
