The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) receives over a quarter of a million malicious email attacks every day, according to official figures.
Data revealed under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act by the Parliament Street think tank’s cybersecurity team, showed that an average of 283,597 malicious emails were blocked by the organisation every day over the first eight months of 2020.
On a monthly basis, the data shows that the BBC receives an average of 6,704,188 hostile emails classed as scam or spam. Additionally, an average of 18,662 malware attacks such as viruses, ransomware and spyware are blocked. Across the eight-month period of January 2020 to August 2020, a total of 51,898,393 infected emails were blocked by the BBC’s systems.
The highest month of attacks was July with 6,801,227 incidents recorded. Of these 6,787,635 were spam and 13,592 were malware. The second highest month was March, when the COVID-19 outbreak was at its worst in the UK. The BBC received 6,768,632 spam attempts and 14,089 malware attempts, totalling 6,782,721.
Tim Sadler, CEO, Tessian, said: “The global pandemic has become a ripe opportunity for hackers’ phishing scams, and we can clearly see that reflected in the spike of malicious attacks on the BBC.”
