Attack on state registers: The Ministry of Justice plans to dismiss the head of the National Information Systems
24 December 2024 07:56
The Ministry of Justice is preparing to dismiss the director general of the National Information Systems State Enterprise, Oleksiy Berezhnyi. This was reported by sources of Ukrayinska Pravda, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports
According to media reports, on December 25 this year, Oleksiy Berezhnyi’s contract with NAIS expires and the company has not received a proposal to extend it.
Earlier, the Minister of Justice of Ukraine Olga Stefanishyna said that the restoration of the registers would begin on Monday, December 23, and within 2 weeks they would try to fully restore the registers. Kommersant Ukrainsky reported on this.
As a reminder, a large-scale failure at the level of the network infrastructure serving state registries became known on December 19. Later, Olga Stefanishyna reported that Russia had launched a cyberattack on state registries under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice to disrupt the operation of critical infrastructure. The registries were temporarily suspended.
Why a cyberattack on state registries became possible
A large-scale cyberattack on the state registries of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine could have occurred either through phishing or bribery of employees who had access to these registries. This was reported by Oleksandr Fediyenko, chairman of the Subcommittee on Cyberspace Security, Government Communications, Cryptographic Protection of Information of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, according to Radio Liberty. According to him, the attack was well prepared, and the login was from a top-level account.
On the eve of the cyberattack, on December 19, NAIS announced planned technical work, in particular on the USR, the State Register of Civil Status Acts, and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency system.
On the day of the hack, the Russian Telegram channel XakNet Team stated that as a result of the attack on NAIS, hackers had accessed the infrastructure with all the data of the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice. The Russians claimed that after getting into the ministry’s infrastructure, they stole and deleted more than 1 billion lines of data in total, including those stored on a backup server in Poland.
