The BBC was bombarded by almost 50 million malicious email attacks between 1st October 2021 and the end of January 2022.

Data on the email attacks was collected via a Freedom of Information act (FOI) request and analysed by a Parliament Street think tank.

The broadcaster was supposedly targeted with an average of 383,278 email threats daily – a 35% increase from the 283,597 email attacks blocked in summer 2020.

In total, the BBC received more than 47 million malicious emails during the four-month period, of which 70,589 were malware attacks, and 291,042 were phishing emails.

This amounts to an average of 2,366 phishing emails and 574 malware attacks, targeting BBC employees daily.

According to cybersecurity experts, one reason for the volume of attacks included busy shopping periods, combined with the rising threat of the omicron variant.

Commenting on the numbers, Tim Sadler, CEO and Co-Founder of cybersecurity firm Tessian, said that targeting employees during busy holiday periods is a “tried-and-tested tactic” by criminals betting that staff will be too busy and distracted.

“As the number of email attacks continues to rise year on year, and spikes during busy periods, organisations must find ways to alert employees to potential phishing attacks,” Sadler said.

“Staff must also be regularly educated on the threats they could be exposed to and make aware of what they need to do should they receive one.

“The BBC especially is an attractive target for cybercriminals who are looking to steal information and harvest those all-important credentials.”

In July last year, it was reported that cyberattacks against UK firms had fallen for the first time in the previous three years.

Research from ISP company Beaming found the volume of threats fell 9% in the second quarter of 2021, compared to the same period of 2020.

This means that UK businesses each suffered an average of 160,610 attempts to breach their online systems between April and June, equivalent to an attack every 49 seconds.

However, large organisations continue to be a prime target for criminals, and BBC email attacks regularly targeted the broadcaster over the four-month period.

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Edward Blake, Area Vice President EMEA, Absolute Software, added: “Large organisations that operate in the public eye, such as the BBC, are lucrative targets for opportunistic cyber criminals, who will stop at nothing to disrupt systems, seize data, or steal sensitive information for the purpose of selling on to interested third-parties or for holding them to ransom.

“The BBC not only ticks the right boxes for being a good target for cyber criminals, but it is also responsible for tens of thousands of employees, and even more endpoint devices.

“All it takes is for one well-placed cyberattack to land, before the extremely sensitive information, or even the operational capacity, of an organisation like the BBC is put at risk.”

Blake provided some suggestions to help firms protect themselves in the future: “This is why it’s imperative that businesses adopt endpoint security, which is self-healing and leverages AI technology, as well as a Zero Trust approach to verify that all users are who they say they are when accessing certain applications and files.

“This is key to preventing malicious actors from moving laterally across a network and stopping costly data loss incidents.”

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