Attack on UK’s Defence Academy Compelled a Rebuild of the IT System

According to a former senior officer, a probable nation-state attack on the UK’s primary defense training facility last year compelled the academy to replace its IT infrastructure. Air Marshal Edward Stringer recently retired as the director-general of joint force development and the UK Defence Academy. 

Every year, the academy teaches roughly 30,000 UK armed forces personnel, as well as civil officials and military personnel from foreign countries. However, it was caught off guard by a cyber-attack in March of last year, which had “significant” operational ramifications, according to Stringer. 

IT team had to find backup ways to use regular internet, etc, to keep the courses running, which they did – but not as smoothly as before, to be fair, added Stringer.

He claimed he didn’t know whether the hackers were criminals or a hostile state, but his main concern was whether the hackers sought to use the Defence Academy as a “backdoor” into much more secret portions of the MOD’s IT systems. When asked if the cyberspies were effective, Air Marshal Stringer replied, “No, I was quite confident, that there hadn’t been any other breaches beyond the Defence Academy.” 

Despite the fact that no important information is believed to have been stolen, teaching was disrupted when courses were shifted online owing to the pandemic. “It doesn’t look like a violent attack, but there were costs. There were costs to operational output.

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.