Labour councillors in Bristol have called an extraordinary meeting so that councillors from all parties can scrutinise a cyber attack on Trading with Schools, the Bristol City Council platform that local schools use to manage their day-to-day operations.
The council first noticed suspicious activity on the service on 21 September, which was later identified as a cyber attack. Labour councillors say they have been given only limited information about the incident since then, and no update on how the council intends to learn from it or stop it happening again.
Katja Hornchen: ‘A deeply troubling incident’
Councillor Katja Hornchen, Labour’s Vice Chair of the Children and Young People Committee, said the attack on the city’s schools was “a deeply troubling incident that cannot be allowed to happen again”.
“Investigations into it are at an early stage, but the Council needs to be on the front-foot to learn lessons from it and better manage these types of threats in future,” she said.
Cllr Hornchen said councillors had not been given sufficient reassurance about the scale of the attack or how it was handled, pointing out that four days passed between the council spotting “suspicious activity” and shutting it down. “In a world where it only takes seconds to transfer large amounts of data, this is very worrying,” she said.
What councillors want answered
A meeting of the Children and Young People Policy Committee is due to be convened soon to examine the incident. Labour wants councillors to look at the nature and timeline of the attack and the steps taken since, whether it was designed to disrupt school systems or to steal sensitive data, and whether any data may have been leaked.
The committee will also consider the disruption schools have faced, the mitigations now in place, lessons from similar incidents elsewhere in the UK and the measures the council is taking to prevent a repeat.
“The Council must be more transparent with elected councillors,” Cllr Hornchen said. “Scrutiny is a crucial component of good governance. By allowing councillors to scrutinise this incident, the administration can learn from it and more effectively manage attacks like this in future.”
