Cyprus authorities successfully dealt with a cyberattack on government portal

Cyprus government portal was the victim of a cyberattack on 20 October but the authorities coped with the incident successfully, the Deputy Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy has said in a statement.

The attempt by the hackers had to do with the accessibility of Government websites and the information available on those websites, but it was not successful, the DepMin explained.

The DepMin notes that the attack was successfully dealt with, after fast and coordinated actions of all the involved services.

Only the central portal gov.cy was affected for a few minutes, but no other individual website of the portal and no other state website or online service, the DepMin clarified in the statement. This type of attack is called DDOS (distributed denial of service attack) and no breach has been achieved, the statement also reads.

It is added that all services remain on alert.

This was the sixth cyber-attack in Cyprus in three days.

Cyta, the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority was also attacked on 19 October, but its operation was not affected, Cyta’s President of the Board of Directors, Maria Tsiakka Olympiou told the Cyprus News Agency.

She said that Cyta’s website was down for some time, because of the attack, but the organisation dealt with the incident effectively and it remains vigilant.

An attempted cyber-attack to bring down the Bank of Cyprus website was successfully thwarted on the afternoon of 18 October, the Bank announced in a press release.

Earlier on 18 October, another attempt targeting the website of Hermes Airports was also reported as unsuccessful.

The Bank of Cyprus says that at around 6.30pm (local time) its websites were subjected to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) cyber attack in an attempt to render them inaccessible."The attempt was successfully thwarted and the websites are up and running," it said.

Hackers also attempted to breach the website of Hermes Airports, the operator of the airports in Larnaca and Paphos, but were successfully countered, Hermes' Aviation Development and Communications Director Maria Kouroupi told CNA.

She noted that the smooth operation of the airports was not affected as the Hermes website is not connected to the airports' systems.

(Source: CNA)