The Ministry of Justice of Ukraine decided to dismiss Oleksiy Berezhny, the general director of the National Information Systems State Enterprise (NAIS), following a large-scale cyber attack on state registers that took place on December 19.
This attack, carried out by Russian hackers, is considered the largest in recent times. As a result of the actions of cybercriminals, the work of key state registers was temporarily blocked, including the Unified State Register (USR), the State Register of Civil Status Acts and the Bankruptcy and Insolvency system.
According to Olga Stefanishyna, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, the goal of the hackers was to disrupt the operation of the critically important infrastructure of Ukraine.
The Russian Telegram channel XakNet Team said that as a result of the attack, they gained access to the entire infrastructure of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. The Russians claim to have stolen and deleted more than 1 billion lines of data, including backups stored on servers in Poland.
What is known about Oleksiy Berezhny?
Oleksiy Berezhny headed NAIS since 2019. Its activities came under criticism after it became known that the company had announced planned technical work on the eve of the attack. This created an additional vulnerability for the system and could contribute to the success of hackers.
Former Minister of Justice Denys Malyuska assured that despite the deletion of data, a serious problem was avoided thanks to backup copies. "The data is stored in several copies, which allows you to restore them in case of destruction," Malyuska noted.
Further steps of the Ministry of Justice
The release of Oleksiy Berezhny is just one of the measures planned by the Ministry of Justice to strengthen the protection of the national information infrastructure. It is expected that the implementation of new cyber security protocols and personnel changes in the responsible departments will be announced in the near future.
