“Could have been bribery or phishing” – Council member Fedienko about the cyber attack on the registers of the Ministry of Justice

The reason for the large-scale cyber attack on the state registers of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine could be both phishing (a type of cyber attack, using fake e-mails, messages to trick a person into providing confidential information – ed.), and bribery of employees who had access to these registers. On December 23, Oleksandr Fedienko, chairman of the subcommittee on cyberspace security, government communications, cryptographic protection of information of the Verkhovna Rada’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, told Radio Svoboda (Svoboda.Ranok project) about this. According to him, the attack was well-prepared, and the entry took place from a top-level account.

“There may also be components of recruiting an employee of this institution, there may be a multi-level mechanism of placing a flash drive so that it reaches the person’s inner perimeter and is turned on. There may be phishing of the computers of all employees, who may be working with a closed circuit, remotely, which is prohibited in principle. Therefore, it is definitely not Vasya, Petya and someone else. This is a clearly, well-planned cyber attack, which could have been carried out given a sufficiently systematic organization,” Fedienko said.

The deputy says that, according to his information, the databases were saved, so the registers can be restored.

“If they have images preserved somewhere (data archive – ed.), which, I hope, is good, this information was confirmed to me from closed sources, I think that in a week or two – they will start to gradually recover,” Oleksandr emphasized Fedienko.

On December 19, the Minister of Justice Olha Stefanishyna announced the most extensive external cyber attack on the state registers of Ukraine in recent times. As a result of the targeted attack, the work of state registers was temporarily stopped.

Stefanishyna said that the hacking of the Ministry of Justice registers did not affect other state information systems, although the Diya application “did not work in the part that is formed from data” from the Ministry of Justice registers. Also, according to her, there is no threat of loss of data or loss of functioning of registers.