Cyber attack detected during PCC election count
Getty ImagesA council suffered a cyber attack on the day staff were counting votes for a county-wide police and crime commissioner by-election.
The Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk detected the incident on 17 July, which affected council services.
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.
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.
Christine Matthews/GeographA 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.
"During this period, we were briefly unable to answer telephone calls and some services accessed through our website were unavailable.
"Our telephone systems were restored within approximately two hours and website services shortly afterwards."
She added that some network services took longer to restore, with normal service resumed the following day.
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.
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Public organisations like local councils, police and hospitals are increasingly facing cyber attacks.
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".
This week, the DfE suffered a major attack and hackers obtained about 607,000 records.
The data taken included telephone numbers and email addresses relating to individuals and organisations but did not include bank details or other sensitive information.
The data protection risk to individuals was not considered high and it is understood the attack was contained quickly.
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.
And more than half of schools have reported an attack or breach in the last year.
The NCSC has been approached for comment about the council attack.
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