According to the Government there have been 41 "attempts to gain unauthorised access to the computer system of HM Land Registry" since 2004. I'm not sure what qualifies as an "access attempt" for that statistic though. It's fair to say that any system on the Internet receives hundreds of "unauthorised access attempts" every day just by virtue of the multitude of worms and scanners out there that are constantly looking for exploitable boxes. The slightly more worrying thing is that the Government also said that "none of these attempts at access have led to a breach in the integrity of the Land Register for England and Wales." An interesting use of the word integrity. Just because the "intergity of the Land Register" was not breached it does not follow the HM Land Regsitry's computer systems' security was not breached.
The information came from a question by Tory MP, David Jones, but it actually opens even more questions I'd say. For a start how do they define an access attempt? Why the need to talk about the intergity of the register when the question related to security breaches of the systems?
2 comments:
I'm also wondering which other departmental computer systems were hacked into. Was the question soley concerning Land Registry?
Interesting to hear some news about the Land Registry - normally there is none. That marks it out as one of the most successful government IT systems there has ever been. As part of my law conversion course, we have been looking at the registry and the consensus is that it makes very few mistakes. It has an "indemnity" fund for compensating people when it messes up, and the fund is in vast surplus each year. This is amazing given the scale and complexity of the project - 3 to 7 year leases will soon be added as well.
I wonder if the NHS, Home Office could learn anything?
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