Britain’s parliament was on Saturday hit by a “sustained and determined” cyberattack designed to identify weak e-mail passwords about a month after a ransomware worm crippled parts of the nation’s health service.
The House of Commons said it was working with the National Cyber Security Centre to defend parliament’s network and was confident it had protected all accounts and systems.
“Earlier this morning, we discovered unusual activity and evidence of an attempted cyberattack on our computer network,” an e-mail sent by parliamentary authorities to the affected people said.
Photo: Reuters
“Closer investigation by our team confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords,” it said.
Britain’s National Health Service was last month hit by a massive global ransomware worm that crippled the computer system and forced some hospitals to turn away patients.
The center is part of the Government Communications Headquarters spy agency, set up last year to tackle what the government believes is one of the biggest threats to British security.
Chris Rennard, a member of the Liberal Democrat party in the House of Lords, was the first to draw attention to the problem, saying on Twitter: “Cyber security attack on Westminster, Parliamentary e-mails may not work remotely, Text urgent messages.”
A spokeswoman for the House of Commons confirmed that unauthorized attempts had been made to access parliamentary accounts and said systems were in place to protect member and staff details.
“As a precaution, we have temporarily restricted remote access to the network,” she said. “As a result, some members of parliament and staff cannot access their e-mail accounts outside of Westminster.”
The attack began on Friday night, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The breach comes two days after the Times of London reported that passwords for British lawmakers, along with 8,000 other UK government and police officials, were being offered for sale on Russian hacking sites.
Most of the passwords seemed to have come from a 2012 hack of the business social network LinkedIn, the Times said.
British Minister for International Trade Liam Fox said the attack was not a surprise and should act as a warning to people across the nation to the threat posed by hackers.
“We’ve seen reports in the last few days of even Cabinet ministers’ passwords being for sale online,” he told broadcasters. “We know that our public services are attacked, so it’s not at all surprising that there should be an attempt to hack into parliamentary e-mails.”
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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