End of the year in Estonian cyberspace: fraudsters were exceptionally active over the Christmas period

End of the year in Estonian cyberspace: fraudsters were exceptionally active over the Christmas period
Photo: RIA

Among the notable cyber incidents, RIA highlights a ransomware attack that hit an education company on 2 December. In the course of the attack, the attacker encrypted the data of the company in the Amazon cloud environment and demanded a ransom for the restoration of the data. The data in question was not personal data or business-critical data and as a result, the company accepted the loss. The attack was possible due to the misuse of an account with excessive rights.

In the morning of 9 December, it was not possible to buy tickets in the city buses in Tartu. The electronic displays of the buses indicating the number of the line and the information screens at the bus stops were also not working. The interruption was caused by the systems of the company providing the service to the public transport system of Tartu running out of disc space.

In the morning of 10 December, a commercial bank experienced short-term disruptions in its services due to a denial-of-service attack. In the afternoon of 16 December, Smart-ID authentication and signing was unavailable for about an hour. This was due to a technical problem that occurred for the service provider after executing scheduled changes.

RIA also received reports in December that several dozen former employees of a state authority still had email accounts of the authority and that some of the accounts with administrative rights of former employees were still active. The impact and specific circumstances of the incident are still being investigated.

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