The cyberattack hit one of Britain’s largest forensic services provider and this has led to the backlog of 20,000 test samples, according to Gizmodo. The company – Eurofins Scientific – was the victim of a specific and targeted ransomware virus, which took down its systems in June 2019. This forced the British police services to temporarily suspend work with the company.
Instead, the crime scene samples were diverted to the national coordination body for law enforcement, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), to find alternative analytical test laboratories. However, as this service was not resourced to process the high volume of samples, the time taken to clear the backlog of samples has been lengthy. The types of samples waiting processing include blood and DNA specimens. This has led to, the BBC reports, a delay to both police investigations and court cases.
In terms of the significance of the attack, the proportion of samples sent to Eurofins accounts for over half of forensic science provision in the U.K. (estimated at 70,000 criminal cases per year). To extricate itself from the ransomware attack, Eurofins paid the unknown hackers the required sum of money. Messages were sent by the perpetrators to demand a payment in order to unlock the frozen accounts.
Eurofins said the attack “caused disruption to many of its IT systems in several countries” in a statement on it website. The ransomware involved appears to have been a new malware variant, although no specific details have been shared.
According to The Independent, the the NPCC has now announced that Eurofins had been allowed to resume forensic work for British police forces.
The forensic science service in the U.K. used to be state owned. It was controversially closed down by the Conservative-Liberal coalition government in 2012, and the work outsourced to private sector providers.
At the time, Mike Clancy representing scientists working for the service said: “Cost will now determine justice in the U.K. The government is putting its faith in an untested market to deliver forensic science at a time when it has never been more important to the detection of crime.”
