Continuous hacking attacks have managed to block the online census in Bulgaria, which began on Tuesday. On the third day, the system was down due to another large-scale denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
Two of the attacks committed during the first days could be traced to Chinese and Swedish IP addresses. On Wednesday, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) temporarily restricted access to the site and all of its systems to prevent data leakage.
The President of the Institute, Sergei Tsvetarski, will speak to the Bulgarian Parliament about problems in the system.
Bulgarian Democratic MP Ivaylo Mirchev, who has experience in IT business, has criticized NSI for failing to carry out basic activities to protect the national census platform from DoS attacks.
“NSI had 10 years to prepare for this moment. In the last six years in the country, we have witnessed a series of attacks on the technical infrastructure of many government institutions. It turns out that no one in NSI has drawn conclusions from this, says Mirchev.
Bulgarian cybersecurity expert Spas Ivanov told Nova TV that “the goal of blocking the census system is usually political”. According to him, access to the institute’s website should be limited to Bulgarian IP addresses as this would reduce attacks with false access requests from China, Russia and Argentina.
Dozens of Bulgarians have already lodged complaints with the National Ombudsman about suspicions of threatened rights in the census process.
Two years ago, the Bulgarian tax authorities allowed the theft of personal data from almost five million Bulgarians, foreigners with companies in the country and companies.
(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)
Copyright (c) Novinite.com. Published with permission via the news agency Big News Network