Britain's parliament was hit by a "sustained and determined" cyber attack on Friday and Saturday designed to identify weak email passwords, just over a month after a ransomware worm crippled parts of the country's health service, Reuters reported.
By Sunday, up to 90 accounts were said to have been compromised, meaning less than 1 per cent of the system's users, as The Guardian claimed suspicion had fallen on Russia and North Korea, according to The Independent.
An email passed to HuffPost UK said hackers were “carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all Parliamentary user accounts in attempt to identify weak passwords.”
As TechTarget explains it, brute force cracking "is a trial and error method used by application programs to decode encrypted data such as passwords or Data Encryption Standard (DES) keys, through exhaustive effort (using brute force) rather than employing intellectual strategies."
MSSP Alert will update this coverage as more information becomes available.
