I would be grateful if you could provide me with the internal records of the performance of Devon County Council’s (DCC’s) planning website, specifically the section where planning applications can be searched, documents viewed and downloaded, and comments/objections submitted.
I would like to see the records of the occurrence and duration of all instances where these functions were not available to members of the public between 1st March 2022 and 12th June 2022 inclusive.
If this functionality varies as a function of the specific application, or type of application, I would like to receive these records listed with reference to the specific application identifier and with respect to the DCC’s classification of types of Planning Application.
The planning website was infected by malware at 10:15am on 28th May 2022 and was unavailable from that time until 14:40 on 30th May 2022.
Devon County Council (DCC) can confirm that we hold further information about that particular outage, however, we consider this is exempt from disclosure under Section 31(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
This is because the Council considers that this information constitutes valuable intelligence, that could be leveraged by a motivated cyber threat actor to inform a successful attack against our infrastructure. We feel that releasing this information would therefore increase the chances of DCC becoming the victim of a cyber-attack.
We have considered the public interest in releasing this information and whilst we recognise that there is an overriding public interest in openness and transparency, we feel that there is a stronger public interest in the Council maintaining the security and integrity of its IT systems.
We feel that significant weight should be applied to this public interest consideration given the current elevated cyber threat landscape facing public sector organisations. For these reasons we feel that the balance of public interest weighs in favour of withholding this information from disclosure.