Ukraine faced one of the largest cyberattacks in recent times, which paralyzed the work of several state registers, including the real estate register. Although officials assure that the data of Ukrainians remains intact, the incident revealed the vulnerability of the country's digital infrastructure.
What happened?
The cyberattack disabled a number of key registries, including:
- State register of property rights to immovable property (DRRP);
- Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Individual Entrepreneurs and Public Organizations (USR);
- State Land Cadastre.
The work of these registers has been completely stopped, which has caused the paralysis of notarial activity and halted real estate transactions.
Was the data affected?
According to MP Ihor Fries, who heads the parliamentary working group investigating the consequences of the attack, there was no data leakage or modification.
"There were no changes, modifications or destruction of information. The archives are securely stored, and restoring access to the registers is only a matter of time," he noted.
Despite reassuring statements, the very fact of the architecture of the registers being broken raises questions about the effectiveness of the existing protection system.
Notaries have not been able to conduct any real estate transactions for more than a week. Also impossible are:
- Registration of business and public organizations;
- Change of residence;
- Obtaining extracts from the land cadastre.
Private notary Nataliya Kozayeva notes that only a limited list of notarial acts, such as certification of wills or powers of attorney, is temporarily allowed.
The Ministry of Justice assures that the property protection mechanism remains reliable. All actions in the registers are automatically recorded, so even in the event of an unauthorized access attempt, the manipulations can be easily traced.
"Talks about the risk of illegal possession of property is manipulation," the Ministry of Justice said.
The parliamentary working group is developing recommendations for strengthening the security of state registers in order to avoid the recurrence of similar incidents.
Despite the optimistic forecasts of officials, the restoration of the registers may take several weeks. At this time, the government plans to:
- Develop more reliable cyber protection mechanisms;
- Check the vulnerabilities of the existing infrastructure;
- Create backup systems for uninterrupted operation of registers in crisis situations.
