A cyber attack on Cheshire East would be ‘catastrophic’ and the council should ‘wargame’ a hypothetical situation to see how it would cope, a councillor said.
Cllr Andrew Kolker (Con) was speaking at the audit and governance committee and questioned whether the council was adequately prepared in the event of such an attack.
“I’d suggest that a full-on ransomware attack on the council would be catastrophic,” said the Dane Valley councillor.
“You’d have to operate a council with no computers, no telephones except for mobile phones, and I would suggest that might be quite difficult, in fact, nigh on impossible.”
He said the issue had been highlighted by the recent CrowdStrike outage which instantly wiped out computer systems across the world.
“We’re extremely vulnerable as a world to cyber attacks and cyber outages, so I would suggest that, in fact, it may be worth ‘wargaming’ for the council,” he said.
“I don’t know whether you can do that – but have a hypothetical situation whereby the whole of the council’s IT goes out and see whether you can run the council without any IT, and I’d suggest it would be extremely difficult.”
He said councils would also be expected to step in if there was an attack on Visa, for example, and people were unable to buy food or fuel.
“You can imagine the impact that would have on our society,” said Cllr Kolker.
“So, I think these are extremely important issues that need to be very, very carefully thought about by the council and how they would handle it.”
Josie Griffiths, head of audit and risk management, said a type of ‘wargaming’ is scheduled across the organisation.
“We have taken part in broader, emergency planning led scenarios along a very similar line,” she said.
“And yes, it is very difficult to be able to manage and deliver the full program of services which this organisation delivers, and we really need to be able to understand, criticality, proportionality, accessibility.”
Co-opted committee member Ron Jones said: “There is, I believe, a back-up policy in place for computer failure, so we do have a foundation on which we can work should that happen.”
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