Glasgow City Council impacted by ‘cyber incident’

Glasgow City Council announced on Wednesday being impacted by a cyber incident which it said was “disrupting a number of online services and which may have involved the theft of customer data.”

The nature of the incident hasn’t been confirmed. It was uncovered by the council’s IT supplier CGI last week, “on servers managed by a third-party supplier,” according to the council’s statement.

Day-to-day digital and online services have been disrupted by the council taking the affected servers offline. Its statement included an apology “for the anxiety and inconvenience this incident and the necessary response to it will undoubtedly cause.”

The council said it could not confirm whether data had been removed in the incident, but said it is “operating on the presumption that customer data related to the currently unavailable web forms may have been exfiltrated.”

Residents have been advised to be cautious if they are contacted by anyone claiming to be from the city council, and are encouraged to report to Police Scotland if they are contacted by anyone claiming to have their data.

The incident follows a ransomware attack last year impacting the National Health Service in Dumfries and Galloway, the region south of Glasgow. All households in the region received letters in June warning them that cybercriminals are likely to have published medical data about them stolen from the NHS in a ransomware attack in February.