Romania has been a source for cyber-attacks to other states in the past years but it may become the target of such attacks in the near future, a favorite target for hackers or cyber criminals, reports local Hotnews.ro.

In 2015, most of the cyber-attacks against Romania came from Russia and China. In general, the cyber-attacks initiated by state actors targeted Romania for its role in international structures such as NATO and the EU, similar events occurring in other member states.

According to experts from the cyber system, the state actors are often hidden behind groups of hackers or criminal networks, and the Internet is not an easy environment to monitor so identifying a state as the source of an attack is difficult.

Starting 2015, after completing the implementation of a project financed by EU funds, the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) and the CyberINT center have been monitoring the cyber security for 57 institutional structures in Romania. More than 250,000 potentially dangerous events have been reported on a daily basis in all the monitored institutional structures, over 130,000 of them being links and redirects to malicious sites, reports Hotnews.ro.

The CryptoLocker viruses represent the most common threat to computers and state institutions in Romania. They are ransomware attacks in which, through the installation of malicious apps, the hacker takes control of the computer and encrypts most files of interest, from databases to documents and video files. Hackers then ask for large amounts of money to unlock them.

Sources from the system say that such attacks have already occurred in state institutions, but their number might strongly increase in the coming years. As most institutions can't pay the ransoms demanded by hackers, there have been cases in which the employees in those institutions had to work day and night to rebuild the databases.

Romania's Government plans to launch a public debate on the cyber security law, which should help the state protect its IT platforms and databases.

How much are the Romanians willing to pay to recover data blocked by ransomware viruses?

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com