TIRANA, November 30 – The Prosecutor’s Office of Tirana considers a state attack sponsored by the Iranian government, mainly by the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard, an attempt to paralyze Albanian online government services. According to the investigations so far, hackers intended to destroy all systems, paralyze services to citizens and create chaos in society, the prosecution said in a statement on Wednesday.
After two years of trying to achieve this goal, the attacks intensified in six episodes in July, using as an entry point a public website where five electronic engineers under criminal responsibility had not updated their anti-viruses or communicated with the implementing companies.
The five suspects for whom the court imposed an ‘obligation to appear’ were IT specialists in the Ministry of the Interior, the Directorate of Prisons and in the DAP, and according to prosecutor Bledar Valikaj, the abuse of their office consists in the fact that they did not perform actions to prevent the situation.
This investigation is related to the first attack on AKSH as all the cyber attacks suspected to be the Iranians have been united in a single one.
International experts, including the FBI, have concluded that the hackers were infiltrated by exploiting the weakness of share print server 2016, where they took the user’s credentials and then acted in the role of local administrators on the servers. /Argumentum.al
