Criminal Records Office Hit By A "Cyber Incident”
The process of securing an overseas visa has been thrown into disarray after the UK Criminal Records Office (ACRO) was hit with a two-month cyber security “incident” resulting in a backlogs of visa applications waiting for criminal clearance after the cyber incident impacted services for two months.
ACRO is a policing service that provides certificates to Britons with details of their criminal records to attach to visa applications when applying to travel and work abroad.
ACRO has been struggling to recover from a cyber event since January 17. An email sent to customers impacted by the operational issue reportedly claimed that their data may have been exposed, although the nature of the incident has not yet been disclosed.
This could mean highly sensitive data including “identification information and any criminal conviction data” could be in the hands of criminal extortionists.
Tweets from ACRO since January hint at problems for the unit. On February 9 it blamed a ‘technical issue’ for a website outage, and a fortnight later claimed that police certificates were taking longer to process due to ‘heavy demand.’ By March 21, ACRO had returned to blaming ‘essential website maintenance’ for the website outage. A note on the official website asks customers for patience as it “works through our technical issues” and requests applicants send an email to the office.
The incident is understood to have caused significant backlogs in the processing of essential police certificates, without which applicants are unable to obtain work or residence visas for many foreign countries.
There is currently no evidence that personal data or payment information has been affected by the incident. ACRO is currently working with authorities to investigate the incident further. The organisation’s website is currently displaying a single page with essential customer information only, directing them to ACRO’s Twitter account for up-to-date guidance.
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