Pierluigi Paganini August 14, 2019

A parliamentary committee in the Czech Republic blames a foreign country state for a cyberattack that hit the Czech Foreign Ministry

A parliamentary committee in the Czech Republic revealed that the National Cyber and Information Security Agency blamed a foreign state for a cyber attack that targeted the Czech Foreign Ministry.

The committee did not reveal the name of the state allegedly involved in the attack.

“The committee of the upper house of parliament said it received the findings of the National Cyber and Information Security Agency on Tuesday. The allegedly responsible country wasn’t specified.” states the Associated Press.

Interior Minister Jan Hamacek told the CTK news agency that the government infrastructures have been dealing with the cyber attack for several months.

A Czech spy agency blamed Russia for another wave of attacks targeting the Foreign Ministry in 2016, state-sponsored hackers hacker broke into 150 ministry email accounts.

At the time, the Czech Foreign Minister confirmed that hackers did not penetrate the ministry’s internal communication system and no confidential material was compromised, even if attackers stole a huge quantity of data.

A government source told Reuters that Czech authorities suspected the attacks originated from Russia. The Czech experts discovered the security breach early January 2017.

The Czech Republic is one of the NATO alliance, in October 2016 Czech authorities arrested Russian citizen Yevgeniy Nikulin, who was extradited to the United States in March 2018. Yevgeni Nikulin was requested by the US for alleged cyber attacks on social networks and by the Russian authorities that charged him with frauds. According to US authorities, the man targeted LinkedIn and Formspring and hacked into the file hosting service Dropbox.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – state-sponsored hacking, Czech Republic)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]