Cyberattacks on Met Office up 22% year-on-year

Millions of threats blocked every year

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather and climate service, has reported a 22% increase in cyberattacks over the past year, with a total of 8.87 million threats blocked between May 2024 and April 2025.

This surge follows a broader trend of increasing cyber threats on critical national infrastructure.

The figures, provided after a Freedom of Information (FoI) request by Centropy PR, show that the Met Office has faced more than 21 million cyberattacks in the past three years. The period the 2023-2024 saw an even larger year on year rise of 66%, from 5.3 million to 7.2 million threats blocked.

While the Met Office disclosed the total number of cyber threats blocked, it withheld detailed breakdowns of attack types, such as spam, phishing and malware, arguing that releasing such specifics could compromise its cybersecurity measures and expose vulnerabilities to potential attackers.

These figures are broadly in line with the increase in cyberattacks on other businesses, and there is nothing to suggest a disproportionate rise in attacks targeted at weather services.

Nevertheless, attacks on weather and climate services can be hugely disruptive and they have been the subject of attacks, not least the notorious leak of climate research by the University of East Anglia just prior to the COP 15 summit in 2009.

In 2020 the Met Office and other European weather services were targeted by a wave of malicious emails carrying malware, many delivered through business email compromise (BEC), which disrupted staff operations and forced enhanced security measures, and earlier this year South Africa’s weather service was taken offline by a cyber attack.

John Lucey, VP EMEA at digital forensics company Cellebrite, said there has been a rise in the sophistication of cyberattacks targeting public institutions like weather services.

”One of the most worrying developments is the rise of AI-powered phishing. Attackers are now using generative AI to craft emails that are highly personalised, grammatically perfect, and even mimic internal language or past email threads.”