The Treasury Is One of Most Attacked UK Government Departments

According to the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, Her Majesty's Treasury is one of the government departments with the highest rate of cyber attacks against them.

"During 2010, hostile intelligence agencies made hundreds of serious and pre-planned attempts to break into the Treasury’s computer system.

"In fact, it averaged out as more than one attempt per day. This makes the Treasury one of the most targeted departments across Whitehall," he told the audience at today's Google Zeitgeist event in London, according to Naked Security.

One example of the speed with which attackers strike is an incident that occurred in 2010 when a legitimate G20-related email carrying an attachment was sent to the HM Treasury.

A few minutes later the same email arrived again with the attachment containing a piece of information stealing malware.

"To the recipient it would have simply looked like the attachment had been sent twice. Fortunately, our systems identified this attack and stopped it," Mr. Osborne said.

The MP also reiterated what the director of the UK Government's Communications Headquarters revealed last year, that government networks receive over 20,000 malicious emails per month.

A large number of these are probably the same type of spam the rest of the world gets, however, many of them are likely targeted attacks that aim to infect government computers with malware for the purpose of stealing sensitive information.

In February, the UK foreign secretary, Mr. William Hague, announced that earlier this year three Foreign Office employees were targeted via emails that carried malicious attachments and were crafted to look as originating from their colleagues.

Back in November 2010, Simon Kershaw, head of the MoD's defence security and assurance, revealed that a high-ranking Ministry of Defence official was also targeted by a foreign intelligence agency in a spear phishing attack.