A Greater Manchester council is fighting off ‘10,000 attacks a day’ on its systems from cyber hackers, leaders have revealed.

Members of Oldham Council’s Cabinet have agreed to spend £682,000 on procuring a ‘modern data protection service’ which can safeguard its data against deletion or manipulation, and protect it from ransomware attacks.

Currently the system in place means there is ‘no ability to protect the backup data against malicious damage’ or protect services held in the Cloud, officers said.

Consequently the council has decided to procure a the Rubrik Air Gap system and move all of its data and backup requirements to the new service.

The reason for the decision was to ensure ‘services and data is protected against loss is critical for both disaster recovery scenarios and to protect against accidental deletion, corruption or other error leading to a loss of information’, the report to cabinet states.

It follows high profile malware attacks on other organisations, including the University of Manchester and Redcar and Cleveland council. The leader of that local authority told a parliamentary committee earlier this year that the 2020 cyber attack cost them £7m, and caused a ‘catastrophic’ eight months of disruption.

Ransomware is type of a malware that prevents access to devices and data, with a criminal group then demanding a ransom for decrypting the information. Attackers may also threaten to leak the data that they steal.

Speaking at the meeting, Cabinet member for finance and corporate resources, Councillor Abdul Jabbar said: “On a daily basis we get 10,000 attacks on our system.

“We’ve got all the known safety measures in place to protect our IT systems and hopefully that will continue. It will mean all the services can continue with delivering the services that our residents need.

“We hold lots of financial information, lots of personal information about many, many thousands of our customers and we take it extremely seriously.”

Councillor Elaine Taylor said: “I think given some of the cyber attacks that we’re sweeping recently I think this is quite timely and I think it’s money well spent.

“It’s quite a scary prospect to think that all of our systems would go down and all of that data would be out in the public domain so it’s a very worthwhile report and I fully support it.”

Coun Jabbar added that more than 50 councils, including  Manchester City Council, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority were already working with the Rubrik platform.

He told members: “We’ve been using for a number of years the Commvault system hardware and software which has served us really well but given that we’ve got a modern IT landscape and we need to have the cutting edge equipment to make sure our data is protected and if we need to restore it then what we’re suggesting is that we need a new system.”