The Police Federation of England and Wales has released an official statement today that their database was hit by ransomware on March 9th this year which impacted several servers including the email systems of the company.
News is out that the malware attack took place on the IT Infrastructure of the federation’s Surrey Headquarters which represents over 119,000 police officers across 43 forces in England and Wales.
As of now, there is no evidence that the encrypted data was extradited to remote servers. But officials are still deeply investigating the incident and so a conclusion on this point is yet to be made.
The National Crime Agency has been pressed into service to investigate the incident and prima facie reveals that the impact on the organization was likely a part of a wider campaign.
A news resource reports that the police authorities reported the incident to the UK’s data protection regulator on March 11th, 2019 which is as per the EU Law stipulation of reporting such incidents within three days of the occurrence.
Interestingly, the news comes 2 days after the Noway based aluminum producer Norsk Hydro reported that its servers were hit by the ransomware strain called LockerGoga.
Hydro claims that most of its manufacturing operations of Aluminum were restored by this Thursday and will become fully operational by Wednesday next week.
Note- The ransomware variant which targeted the servers of the Police Federation is yet to be known. And the authorities are suspecting the involvement of some state-funded actors.
