Three UK councils have shut down some public-facing systems due to ongoing cybersecurity concerns.
Three local authorities in Kent, Canterbury City Council, Dover District Council and Thanet District Council, jointly said on Friday they were “investigating a cyber incident” that may have disrupted online services for hundreds of thousands of residents. . All three committees said they were working closely with the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which confirmed to TechCrunch that they were “working to fully understand the impact” of the incident.
Robert Davis, Andy Steele and Marvia Roach, spokespersons for Canterbury City Council, Dover City Council and Thanet City Council, via electronic Separate emails told TechCrunch that due to an ongoing cybersecurity incident, the nature of which is still unknown, parts of the parliamentary website “may not work as expected.”
At the time of writing, Canterbury City Council’s website states that residents “are currently unable to apply for, report or pay for most services online” or “search or comment on planning applications or use our online maps”.
Canterbury City Council spokesman David Davis said the city had isolated all systems out of an “abundance of caution”, but added that the council’s initial investigation indicated that no customer data had been accessed, the city’s website A statement above echoed this. .
NCSC and the three committees declined to say whether the cybersecurity issues were related to internal systems or external vendors.
TechCrunch understands that the ongoing outage is related to an outage affecting EK Services, an organization founded in 2011 by Canterbury, Dover, and Thanet. All three councils outsource IT and HR services such as call centres, benefits and debt recovery to EK Services. EKS, whose website was inaccessible at the time of writing.
TechCrunch discovered that some of Canterbury City Council’s payment systems provided by EKS were not working. Problems with online forms and online payments were also reported in Dover and Thanet.
Outsourcing giant Civica has been providing EKS services since 2018 as part of a seven-year deal to cut costs across the three councils.
“We can confirm that this incident was not caused by any of our systems,” Civica spokesman Fintan Hastings said in a statement to TechCrunch. Hastings declined to comment further, but did not deny that EKS was the victim of a cyber attack. . “If requested, we will support affected customers and do whatever we can to assist to minimize the impact on them and the citizens they serve,” Hastings said.
TechCrunch reached out to multiple people at EKS but had not heard back as of this writing. TechCrunch was also unable to contact EKS representatives by phone.
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