Twelve Norwegian government ministries have been hit by a cyber attack.
News of the attack was made public on July 24, and involved a vulnerability in a third-party supplier to the government.
Erik Hope, head of the government agencies that supplies services to government ministries, said of the cyber attack: “We identified a weakness in the platform of one of our suppliers. That weakness has now been shut.”
The cyber attack took place on July 12, and was discovered after the supplier’s platform detected “unusual” traffic. After the attack was discovered, steps were taken to mitigate it and the relevant authorities were contacted. While an investigation has been launched into the attack, Hope noted that it is too early to say who was responsible for the attack, or the attack’s full impact.
Of the government ministries affected by the cyber attack, Norway’s foreign, defense and justice ministries remained unaffected. This is due to the fact that these ministries use a separate IT system to other ministries, Hope explained.
Norway suffers DDoS attack in June 2022
In June 2022, a number of Norwegian organizations suffered distributed-denial-of-service attacks that disrupted their processes.
The cyber attack was reported by the Norwegian NSM Security authority on June 29, 2022. The NSM did not name the organizations impacted by the attacks, and only said that the organizations targeted were both public and private organizations that offered important services.
The NSM noted that it had seen similar attacks befall other countries, assuring the public that none of these countries had reported any lasting impact related to the cyber attack.
The NSM blamed a “criminal pro-Russia” group for the attacks, with NSM chief Sofie Nystroem saying: “We are working to find out whether there is a link with state-sponsored actors.
Despite the scope of the attacks, Nystroem said the NSM was “quite certain” that no sensitive information was stolen during the cyber attack.