ICO confirms data breach probe as UK councils remain downed by cyberattack

Three Kent councils (Canterbury, Dover, and Thanet), serving nearly 500,000 residents, are experiencing prolonged outages to online services after a reported cyber incident affecting East Kent Services (EKS); the Information Commissioner’s Office has received breach reports, EKS’s site and some services remain offline, and a researcher has suggested a possible link to exploitation of Ivanti/Pulse Secure VPN zero‑day vulnerabilities, though the nature of the attack and whether personal data was accessed have not been confirmed.