Westminster City Council Breach Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (WES2233622112725)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Westminster City Council breach identified under incident ID WES2233622112725.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Westminster City Council's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/westminster-city-council, the number of followers: 34570, the industry type: Government Administration and the number of employees: 2894 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 769 and after the incident was 744 with a difference of -25 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Westminster City Council and their customers.

On 24 November 2023, Westminster City Council disclosed Cyber Attack issues under the banner "Major Cyber Attack on Tri-Borough London Councils' Shared Commuter System".

Westminster City Council, along with Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham, confirmed a major cyber attack on their shared IT systems under a tri-borough arrangement.

The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting Shared commuter system and IT systems under tri-borough arrangement.

In response, teams activated the incident response plan, moved swiftly to contain the threat with measures like Isolation and protection of systems, while recovery efforts such as Restoring systems and Maintaining critical services continue, and stakeholders are being briefed through Public statements on council websites and Apologies to residents for disruptions.

The case underscores how Ongoing (early stages, no arrests made), with advisories going out to stakeholders covering Public statements acknowledging disruptions and apologizing for inconvenience.

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.

Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Exploit Public-Facing Application (T1190) with moderate to high confidence (70%), supported by evidence indicating shared IT systems under a tri-borough arrangement targeted, no specific vector but implies public-facing compromise and Valid Accounts (T1078) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating shared commuter system and IT systems may leverage shared/valid credentials across boroughs. Under the Impact tactic, the analysis identified Endpoint Denial of Service: Application Exhaustion Flood (T1499.004) with moderate to high confidence (80%), supported by evidence indicating disruptions persist, delays in responses and service delivery suggest resource exhaustion and Inhibit System Recovery (T1490) with moderate to high confidence (75%), supported by evidence indicating ongoing disruptions, recovery efforts prioritize system stabilization imply hindered restoration. Under the Lateral Movement tactic, the analysis identified Remote Services: Windows Admin Shares (T1021.006) with moderate confidence (65%), supported by evidence indicating shared IT systems under tri-borough arrangement suggests intra-network movement via admin shares. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Indicator Removal: File Deletion (T1070.004) with moderate confidence (60%), supported by evidence indicating no explicit data theft confirmed may indicate log/logic tampering to obscure tracks. Under the Command and Control tactic, the analysis identified Ingress Tool Transfer (T1105) with moderate confidence (55%), supported by evidence indicating cyber incident experts containment suggests possible malicious tooling detected in systems. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.