City of London Corporation hit with nearly 1 million cyber attacks every month

Cyber criminals have launched nearly 3 million attacks on the City of London Corporation, the municipal governing body of the City of London, in the first three months of 2019, according to official figures.  The findings, which were released under Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation, paint a disturbing picture of the threats posed to the 10,000 residents of the CoL as well as 10 million annual tourists and 400,000 daily commuters who enter the city.  In total 2,783,336 attacks were logged in the first three months of 2019, an average of 927,000 per month.  In comparison, 4,397,363 attacks were recorded from April to December of 2018, with an average of just under 500,000 (488,596). This effectively means the monthly average of recorded Spam, spoof mail and malware has more than doubled since 2018. According to the information released by City of London’s response, in the last year it has been hit by 7,180,699 cyber attacks in total during the period of April 2018 to March 2019. A substantial majority of these attacks were those categorised as ‘spam’, of which 6,918,580 were recorded. The second highest category was ‘spoof mail’, which was logged at 244,293 attacks. There were also 17,556 instances where ‘top malware’ was detected. Andy Heather, VP, Centrify comments:“The high volume of sensitive public information contained within the systems and databases of organisations like the City of London Corporation make it a top target for hackers and cyber criminals. Malicious email scams such as phishing and malware attacks form a substantial part of the wider cyber threat facing councils across the country, in London and beyond.  With so many attacks taking place every day, it’s vital that all organisations adopt a zero-trust approach to user activity, to prevent hackers gaining access to council systems using legitimate log-in details that may have been stolen or purchased on the dark web.”