Hackers hit property registry

Hellenic Cadastre, the agency that keeps the country’s property registry, came under cyber attack with, so far, unknown consequences.

Kathimerini understands that the attack was done from two different sites, with the hackers using employees’ passwords.

In the first attack, the hackers stole some files of minimal importance, Ministry of Digital Governance officials said. But in the second, which was discovered on Thursday afternoon, they breached one of the ministry’s servers that held a backup of the main property registry database.

Employees in Hellenic Cadastre were asked to change their passwords and implement two-step verification.

By late last night, it had been verified that no data had been deleted. But the hackers had left no traces about which records they may have copied and it is not known whether they had left any malware for later activation. It will take some time to verify or exclude either action, since more than 1,500 PC and server terminals are involved.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Cyberdefense Division is actively involved in investigating the incident and is expected to compile an incident report over the next few days.

Property transactions were not affected by the incident and all the regional offices of the agency worked without problems on Thursday.