At 3am one Saturday morning last year everything changed for Redcar & Cleveland BC. It was 8 February 2020 – just weeks before the start of the coronavirus pandemic – but the council was facing a more pressing threat: a ransomware cyber attack that encrypted the local authority's systems, with crooks demanding a £1m ransom in Bitcoin.

Very quickly, it became clear that the council was unable to access most of its datasets and files, and the majority of its IT devices were rendered unusable. More than 135,000 residents were unable to access services.