Resort council combatting cyber crime

Blackpool Council is taking measures to protect its systems from potential cyber attacks and the increased prevalence of Artificial Intelligence,

The council’s Audit Committee is to consider the possibility of a cyber crime in a progress report on individual risks identified in the Council’s Strategic Risk Register.

A meeting of the committee is to be held on Thursday June 11 and will examine the controls being implemented to manage the strategic risk relating to increasingly sophisticated technology and the way it is being used by  criminals – from home and abroad – to target businesses and organisations.

The report looks at the potential impact to the council of the risk of cyber attacks and what is being done to counter such risks.

Risks include: Cyber fraud and the increased prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI); reputational damage; loss of compliance with security regimes; loss of confidence in using Council online services; monetary penalties / fines / claims; ransomware attacks with the prevalence of these attacks increasing and impacting a number of local authorities.

Other issues potentially include AI phishing attacks where AI systems are increasingly used to fool victims and illegally extract confidential data.

What report says

The report states: “An approved AI Policy is in place and this was recently updated to strengthen the section on the ethics of AI.

“Cyber training needs to be carried out by all Council IT users on an annual basis.

“The messaging to  the ‘end users’ remains the same in terms of phishing e-mails and therefore it is important to continue to reinforce the same message.

“This will continue to be reviewed and updated as appropriate as the method of attacks continues to become more sophisticated such as AI being used for voice cloning.

“From an IT point of view, they have an increasing challenge to protect the network from powerful AI models, and this makes patching vulnerabilities more important than ever so work continues to be delivered in this area.

“IT continues to look to buy a greater range of services and seek to increase the scope of the SOC to increase detection capabilities.

“The stance that IT continues to take is that they anticipate a device will be compromised and therefore the focus is ensuring that this doesn’t spread into the wider network.”