Email Addresses And Passwords Of Wexford County Council Staff Shared On The Dark Web

Wexford’s local radio station

Wexford County Council says its network and user accounts remain secure after a number of email addresses and passwords ended up on the dark web.

The sensitive details were discovered by the Local Government Management Agency’s dark web monitoring system along with dozens of other Local Authorities and organisations.

The council’s IT department says it wasn’t the subject of a hack but that these details were published by an unknown actor claiming to have gathered the information from an old Russian cyber crime forum that regularly published information stolen through data breaches suffered by various third parties in the past.

Once notified, ICT Security confirmed the details were outdated as many of the passwords "did not meet the minimum complexity requirements for our environment".

All affected users were contacted to rest their passwords as a precautionary measure.

In a security update as part of the Chief Executive’s Report for October, the IT department confirmed the council’s email addresses stopped 462 thousand emails from "malicious IP" addresses while 197 containing "malicious links or attachments" were also stopped.

Elsewhere last month, members of the public received emails purporting to be from council staff but these were found to be fraudulent.

The council has asked the public to remain vigilant and not to click on any links, provide personal information, or make any payments in response to suspicious messages.

That report was funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.