Land registry hit ‘over 400 times’ by hackers

Hellenic Cadastre, the agency keeping and managing Greece’s property registry, had been attacked by hackers hundreds of times by early Friday, but no data exfiltration has been detected, the Ministry of Digital Governance said.

In a statement on Friday, the ministry said there had been more than 400 cyberattacks on Hellenic Cadastre’s computer systems. “The last detected attack was unsuccessful and happened at 5 a.m. on July 19,” the ministry said, adding that an attempt, also unsuccessful, was made to install malware in the registry’s database.

Experts, including from the Cybersecurity Division of the National Defense General Staff, were combing through the agency’s IT systems to determine the extent of the intrusion and whether any damage has been done. By late Friday, no international hacking group had claimed the attack.

The hackers did not breach the main database, the ministry continued, “but did breach one of the backups, without data exfiltration toward servers abroad taking place,” the ministry’s statement added.

The ministry confirmed that there were several data breaches in employees’ computers. So far, it has been determined that 1.2 gigabytes had been exfiltrated, but they had nothing to do with private citizens’ data. The files represent 0.00059% of the 200 terabytes stored in the agency’s systems.