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<\/p>\nA council suffered a cyber attack on the day staff were counting votes for a county-wide police and crime commissioner by-election.<\/p>\n
The Borough Council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk detected the incident on 17 July, which affected council services.<\/p>\n
Officials reported the attack to the National Cyber Security Centre but say investigations found no evidence that any data was accessed or stolen – and it insisted the election was not hampered.<\/p>\n
It comes as the Department for Education (DfE) suffered a major attack this week amid warnings the UK’s critical services were being targeted by hostile states.<\/p>\n
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Staff were counting votes in King’s Lynn for the police commissioner election when the cyber attack took place [Christine Matthews\/Geograph]<\/p>\n
A spokesperson said: “As a precautionary measure, access to a number of council services was temporarily restricted while our ICT team worked to isolate the issue, assess any potential impact and protect council systems.<\/p>\n
“During this period, we were briefly unable to answer telephone calls and some services accessed through our website were unavailable.<\/p>\n
“Our telephone systems were restored within approximately two hours and website services shortly afterwards.”<\/p>\n
She added that some network services took longer to restore, with normal service resumed the following day.<\/p>\n
The council said it did not affect the election count, which resulted in Reform UK’s candidate, Colin Sutton, being elected as Norfolk’s police commissioner.<\/p>\n
More stories from Norfolk<\/p>\n
Public organisations like local councils, police and hospitals are increasingly facing cyber attacks.<\/p>\n
According to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), three-quarters of cyber attacks impacting organisations providing the UK’s critical services and infrastructure can be linked back to “hostile state actors”.<\/p>\n
This week, the DfE suffered a major attack and hackers obtained about 607,000 records.<\/a><\/p>\n The data taken included telephone numbers and email addresses relating to individuals and organisations but did not include bank details or other sensitive information.<\/p>\n The data protection risk to individuals was not considered high and it is understood the attack was contained quickly.<\/p>\n Around a quarter of further education institutions (24%) reported experiencing a breach or attack at least weekly, according to the government’s most recent Cyber Security Breaches Survey.<\/p>\n And more than half of schools have reported an attack or breach in the last year.<\/p>\n The NCSC has been approached for comment about the council attack.<\/p>\n Do you have a story suggestion for Norfolk? Contact us below.<\/p>\n Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, Instagram<\/a> and X<\/a>.<\/p>\n More stories on this topicRelated links