UK Legal Aid Agency Hacked

My first question is, "Why are 48 years of data online?" UK Legal Aid Agency: Hackers stole records dating back to 1978

The Legal Aid Agency (LAA), an executive agency of the UK's Ministry of Justice that manages the country's Public Defender Service, says attackers who breached its IT systems in April 2025 stole records dating back to 1978.

The agency employs around 1,250 staff, oversees billions in legal funding, and works with approximately 2,000 providers, including barristers, solicitor firms, and non-profit organizations that deliver civil and criminal legal aid services in England and Wales.

Apparently to billions of pounds of funding doesn't include much for security. It never does.

The hack included payment information for service providers, and a bunch of more generic information on providers are recipients of legal help.

But back the 48 years. How often does case information from 25 years ago, or more, actually NEEDED? Why couldn't it be in an offline system and requested?

I suppose someone thought that they went to all that trouble to computerize the data from 1978, it should all be in one big heap. Makes it "easy to ask questions."

But then I worked on systems that did exactly that, because storage space was expensive, back in the day.^‡

And the wheel turns.

This week, the UK Housing Ombudsman Service, a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing that settles disputes between social housing residents and social landlords in England, disclosed that it is investigating a third-party IT security incident that impacted its case management system.

Someday government and commercial organizations will take security seriously. Until that time we all need to deal with the fact that drivers license info has been hacked, credit cards, emails, etc. It used to be that the company or organization in question would give you one year of credit monitoring, but they don't even do that anymore. Too bad. So sad. Hope you have a lot of luck in the future.

‡ When I started working in tech, IBM was selling disk drives that cost 6 figures, were about the size of an average refrigerator, and held every bit of 9 gigabytes. Nine. Gigabytes.