Stockton Council is under “constant and increasingly sophisticated” cyber-attack, a service boss has revealed.
Ian Coxon, assistant director of back-office services partnership Xentrall, was asked about cyber-attacks in a council meeting. He was also quizzed about AI as he spoke of the partnership, which has provided services including information and communication technology to Stockton and Darlington councils since 2008.
Councillor Eileen Johnson referred to the 2020 cyber attack on Redcar and Cleveland Council, which cost more than £10m, asking: “Can we sleep easy in our beds?”
Mr Coxon answered: “I’d like to say absolutely but I won’t go that far. I can’t ever give a 100% guarantee around any of that.”
He told Stockton Council’s people select committee Xentrall had a dedicated cyber-security team: “The role of technology changes. We have to keep changing the mix of skills and resource that we have within the service.
“We also have a contract with a company that provides us with a 24-7 monitoring service around all of our network. They have tools that enable them to check everything that’s going on within our network all the time.
“If anything appears untoward it’s either blocked at source or our teams are alerted, even if it’s 4am. We’ve always got people on call and they might get a ping on their phone that something needs some attention.
“We are actually under cyber-attack all the time. It’s constant and it’s increasingly sophisticated.
“As I sit here today we’ve prevented everything. Could I say we won’t experience a Redcar-type situation? Again, no I can’t guarantee that because, despite everything I can do from a technology point of view… the weakest link is people.
“It tends to be state-sponsored terrorism around cyber-attacks. The main way they get into organisational networks and systems is because someone has clicked a link they shouldn’t or shared their login details.”
He said he had spent a lot of time with council teams looking at phishing simulations, where people are tricked into sharing sensitive data, to raise awareness: “We do a lot of work have a lot of things in place to make everything safe and secure.”
Cllr Johnson said: “How confident are you about the use of AI? Maybe I’ve been reading too much science fiction but it worries me that so much is being machine-run without the human element.”
Mr Coxon replied that some types of automation had been used in councils for some time, like programmed scripts for phone responses in customer service contact centres and transcription tools, which could be efficient, time-saving and make staff’s lives easier, but were limited in their use. He said: “Will we ever replace social workers with AI making decisions about care of adults and children?
“No, I don’t think we will. There’s something about assessment processes that can go so far.
“The AI only knows what you tell it, to assess things in a certain way. The efficiency gains are probably there but we need to be really careful that we don’t go too far with that sort of thing.
“Both councils, Stockton and Darlington, are working with ourselves in understanding some of the risks it all poses and making sure that, when we do open things like that up, we’ve drawn the edges around them really quite carefully in terms of what we’re going to use this sort of stuff for and what we’re not.
“Do I personally see a world where there’s only half as many staff as we’ve got and AI’s doing all sorts of stuff that the council does? No I don’t.
“I think there’s a grey area in the middle about making decisions, especially when it affects people’s care and residents’ lives. I don’t think we’ll get too far down that road.”
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He told how Xentrall had saved Stockton and Darlington councils £14m in its first 10 years – double the goal set – as it provided services including design, print, finance, human resources and ICT for a fixed management fee. Cllr Niall Innes asked how the service was ensuring best value and lessening risks.
Mr Coxon said the cost of technological hardware and software had risen globally in recent years, along with the rise of AI infrastructure like data centres. A shortage of components had driven prices up dramatically to “inflation-busting” levels, including the price of servers soaring from about £20,000 to £100,000.
He said they could alleviate some of that as they replaced hardware in advance, while being inventive with repurposing kit and upgrading components: “We’ve probably saved £500,000, truth be told, in bringing that forward.”