1The attack began quietly on a Friday evening, at the exact moment when nobody was watching the systems.
2By Monday morning, every single computer in the city council was displaying the same chilling message on its screen.
3The criminals were demanding half a million pounds in digital currency to unlock the files they had secretly encrypted.
4Overnight, all hospital appointments, school records and local tax payments had simply vanished from public view without any warning.
5Office staff reverted to handwritten paper forms that nobody under the age of thirty knew how to process.
6The council refused to pay the ransom, partly on moral principle and partly because they distrusted the criminals completely.
7In the end, recovery took four painful months and cost roughly three times the original ransom demand in total.
8Investigators later discovered that the attackers had entered the entire council network through a single weak and long forgotten password.
9An employee had written it on a small paper note and taped it beneath her keyboard for convenience.
10The lesson was brutal in its simplicity: our security was only ever as strong as its weakest daily habit.
11Today the council regularly rehearses for cyber attacks in exactly the same way that buildings rehearse for fires.
12We were naive before, but we are humble now, and humility turns out to be a far better defence than arrogance.