Holyrood Officials Suspect China Behind the Recent Cyber Attack on Scottish Parliament

China has been spotted as accused in the recent cyber attack on Scottish Parliament, senior Holyrood personalities told the Sunday Herald.Last month hackers tried to exploit hundreds of Holyrood email accounts by cracking their passwords. No accounts were compromised, but accounts were locked out because of multiple login attempts by the hackers.Users were not able to access their accounts for several days and were forced to update the passwords.Security experts suggest that this kind of cyber attacks are tests which are designed to study about foreign government’s IT infrastructure and security systems.According to Dr. Omair Uthmani, who is the Programme Leader of the Networking and Security degrees at Glasgow Caledonian University “It might simply be blind probing, to see how strong the defences are on a certain infrastructure.Certainly the fact [that the attack] has been detected is one way of saying ‘we probed the defences in one area, and we had a reaction, so that is probably not the way to do it the second time around’.”Sir Paul Grice, Chief Executive of the Scottish Parliament, said that the parliament monitoring system identified the attack at the early stage itself, so they were able to take appropriate measures against the attacks to prevent further damage.He also added the attack was similar to one happened in Westminster in June and their IT system remains fully operational. According to Sunday Herald, Hackers have tried repeated attempts to break into Scottish government networks over the last two years which made the government spend $2 million on enhancing security measure in their networks. Dr. Daniel Dresner, a cybersecurity expert at Manchester University, echoed the GCU academic’s view: “People will often carry out an attack as a bit of experimentation, to see how far they can get, or see what the reactions are. Or, carry out an attack on one part of the system, while they are infiltrating something else completely.” A Scottish Parliament spokesperson said: “We can see which countries across Europe and further afield the attack was routed through, but that doesn’t confirm the place of origin. We won’t list those countries through which the attack was routed but we are liaising with the National Cyber Security Centre.”