Clarion still closed one month on following cyber security attack.

Angry tenants and residents of Clarion Housing Group gathered together at a Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC) meeting on Wednesday 13th July to agree on a plan of action to protest the ongoing systems outage by their landlord.

Britain’s largest housing association, with around 350,000 tenants and residents in 125,000 homes, is approaching the one-month anniversary of a cyber attack for which the landlord appears to have been totally unprepared and without an adequate contingency plan.

Clarion’s systems seem to have lost function on Friday 17th June and a month later and their email and phone lines still appear to be down.

The first issue to concern Clarion members has been the ‘patchiness of communication’.

Lisa, a tenant on a Norfolk estate of around 80 homes, explained:

“I only found out about the cyber attack three weeks after it occurred when my neighbour spotted something about it on Facebook!”

Lisa and her neighbour called on homes across the estate to let people know. None of the tenants they spoke to had received any communication from Clarion.

The second issue raised with SHAC was the implausibility of the delay and inconsistent accounts of the cyber attack’s impact.

Dennis said:

“We are being told that they can’t access their electronic systems, but somehow they’ve been able to get our email addresses.

“We’ve all received an email about paying rents, which we’re told to keep paying even though we can’t always tell if the money goes through.

“We’re told they can send us emails, but there’s no point answering because they can’t be sure our emails will be seen.

“It doesn’t add up. I’ve never heard of a problem that only affects inboxes, not outboxes, and carries on for four weeks”

Tenants, including those on shared ownership tenancies, were told in some cases to redirect their payments to an account with a reference consisting entirely of zeros. It looked so suspicious that some found their online banking apps would not accept the change, and the switch was only possible by calling their bank.

Others were told to set their rent aside instead until the problems were fixed.

Many tenants and residents have experienced a significant jump in spam and phishing activity, which started shortly after the cyber attack.

Clarion however has not yet confirmed to tenants and residents that a breach of their data has occurred, although we understand that the organisation has self-reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Another tenant Barry testified on the increase in spam, saying: “Since the 28th June, I’ve had 31 phishing emails and texts to my phone. Before then, I’d maybe get one or two a month, if that”.

Ellen reported receiving a demand from a finance company showing a credit card had been taken out in her name and used to its limit. When she reported the identity theft to the company, she found that a considerable amount of personal data would have been needed to set it up, all of it information held by Clarion.

Similar stories are being reported across a number of Clarion tenant and resident social media platforms.

SHAC@Clarion members have understandably had enough. The group has agreed on a plan of action now that we will be keeping you up to date with.

If you are experiencing similar problems as a Clarion tenant, please email us at newsdesk@thehaveringdaily.co.uk