On Christmas Eve, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) confirmed that it was responding to a ‘significant’ cyber attack affecting its contact centre, internal systems, processes and internal communications.
In an update today, Terry A’Hearn, Chief Executive of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), stated: “At one minute past midnight on Christmas Eve, SEPA was the subject to a significant cyber-attack involving complex and sophisticated criminality.
“We moved quickly to enact our business continuity arrangements and our core regulatory, monitoring, flood forecasting and warning services are adapting and continuing to operate.
“The above is subject to a live criminal investigation. Whilst continuing to work with Scottish Government, Police Scotland and the National Cyber Security Centre, including across the festive period, the attack remains ongoing and communication into and across the organisation remains significantly impacted.
“Our approach is to take the best professional advice from the multi-agency partners, including Police Scotland, to support our response.
“For the time being, we need to protect a criminal investigation and our systems.
“Some of our internal systems and external data products will therefore remain offline in the short term.
“We’re working hard on analysing the impact before moving to eradicate, remediate and recover and our priorities are focused on incident response, supporting our staff, our priority services and the important work we continue to do in protecting Scotland’s environment and communities.”
The public, regulated businesses and suppliers can find the most up to date information on the SEPA website.
