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Scrape Timestamp (UTC): 2024-07-22 22:49:20.266
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Greece’s Land Registry agency breached in wave of 400 cyberattacks. The Land Registry agency in Greece has announced that it suffered a limited-scope data breach following a wave of 400 cyberattacks targeting its IT infrastructure over the last week. The agency said hackers managed to compromise employee terminals and steal 1.2 GB of data, corresponding to roughly 0.0006% of the total data held by the government organization. The stolen data reportedly does not contain any citizens' personal information but primarily consists of typical administrative documents, the exposure of which is not expected to impact the registry's operations. The announcement also mentions that the hackers attempted to create a malicious user to infiltrate the agency's central database, but they failed. One of the database's backups, which are updated daily, was accessed by the unauthorized actors. However, the subsequent attempt to exfiltrate the data to an external server was blocked. The Land Registry's internal investigation, aided by the Cybersecurity Directorate of the General Staff of National Defense, has not found any evidence of ransomware having been deployed on the breached systems. Emergency actions to reduce the risk of ransomware have been taken, like terminating all VPN access to block malicious users. As a precaution, all of the registry's employees have had their passwords reset, and two-factor authentication has been made mandatory to help protect their accounts from unauthorized access. The last recorded attack occurred in the early morning of July 19, 2024, and was successfully thwarted. No further updates have been provided, so it's unknown if the attacks continue. Currently, the agency's digital services continue to operate as normal, and transactions with citizens, which are considered safe, have remained uninterrupted throughout the attacks. In 2022, Greece's state-owned postal services provider, ELTA, suffered a ransomware attack that caused a country-wide service disruption. A few months later, Ragnar Locker ransomware breached the country's largest natural gas distributor, DESFA, compromising data and causing an IT systems outage.
Daily Brief Summary
Greece's Land Registry experienced a data breach after facing 400 cyberattacks targeting its IT infrastructure over the past week.
Hackers compromised employee terminals and stole 1.2 GB of data, which is approximately 0.0006% of the total data managed by the agency.
The stolen data consisted of administrative documents and did not include any personal information of citizens.
Attempts by attackers to create a malicious user and access the central database were thwarted, though one backup was accessed.
No ransomware was detected on the systems according to the internal investigation supported by the Cybersecurity Directorate of the General Staff of National Defense.
Emergency measures included terminating all VPN access and resetting passwords, with mandatory two-factor authentication for employee accounts.
All attacks, including the last recorded attempt on July 19, 2024, were successfully repelled; normal operations and secure public transactions remain unaffected.
These incidents follow major cyberattacks on other Greek state-owned entities in previous years, including ransomware attacks on the postal service and the country's largest natural gas distributor.