Montenegro is in a hybrid war, and coordinated Russian services are behind the cyber attacks on the government’s IT infrastructure that have been going on for a few days, the National Security Agency of Montenegro (ANB) said. The United States (U.S.) embassy in Podgorica also warned about persistent and continuous cyber attacks. The Minister of Defense of Montenegro Rasko Konjevic told the media that this problem will be dealt with by the National Security Council of Montenegro, which concluded that cooperation with partner countries should be activated as soon as possible.
System lock
”We have to learn from other people’s mistakes, not from our own,” the investigator of the Federal Police Administration (FUP) and cyber security expert Sasa Petrovic told.
In the coming days, more details should be known about the consequences of the cyber attack on Montenegrin institutions, but according to the information so far, these are ransomware attacks.
”These are attacks aimed at locking process systems, servers and the like, where the attacker injects malicious code into the computer program and network, locks all data with strong encryption and then asks for ransom money. It is a common attack in the world. It is usually used by organized crime groups. We have at least one report of this type of attack every day, the targets of which are usually companies. WannaCry ransomware attacks, for example, were recorded in the United Kingdom (UK), where hospitals, airports were attacked… and the last major attack was on an oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S., when systems were locked in this way and oil distribution was disabled. This is one of the tools of cyber warfare today, when one country wants to disable the functioning of the critical infrastructure of another country,” explains Petrovic.
The administration of Elektroprivreda Crne Gore announced that Montenegrin hydropower plants have switched to a manual management system, and some of the user systems have been temporarily disabled.
Experts and investments required
”Certain critical infrastructures such as electricity distribution or hydropower plants have Scada systems, which are protected. They are not related to the Internet. An attacker must find a way to inject malicious code inside. I can’t do it from the outside and I have to have someone inside, unless the Scada administrator made such a catastrophic mistake that he left part of the system connected to the Internet without protection,” Petroviccomments on the possibility of attacks on such facilities.
Regardless of who the targets and perpetrators are, these kinds of attacks are highly sophisticated and cost a lot, so they are usually followed by demands for the payment of certain sums of money. Petrovic says that absolute protection is not possible, but that in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) there is certainly room, but also the necessity to engage and listen to IT experts, and to invest much more in this type of protection. He reminds us that we live in a world where 95 percent of communication takes place through the Internet and where cyber warfare is becoming a daily occurrence.
In most cases, investing in this type of security is usually an “unnecessary expense”, so company owners or those responsible in institutions react only when something happens.
”This should be a lesson, but we will see if it will be. We need to start a more serious story when it comes to information security. People who work on risk assessment and information security should be experts, have knowledge and certifications, and we have enough of them. In our country, it is not at the level it should be. Only when we see something like this in Montenegro do we understand what can happen – whether it will be an attack on electricity distribution companies, emergency telephones, the financial, health sector, the school system, whatever it is, they make it impossible, they make life and normal functioning impossible. We recently had an example where even ordinary sending of emails caused us complications,” warns cyber security expert Sasa Petrovic, FUP investigator, Avaz reports.
E.Dz.
