Ukraine has suffered one of the largest cyberattacks in recent memory, paralyzing several state registries, including the real estate registry. While officials insist that Ukrainians' data remains intact, the incident has exposed the vulnerabilities of the country's digital infrastructure.
What happened?
The cyberattack disabled a number of key registries, including:
- State Register of Real Property Rights (SRRP);
- 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 paralysis of notarial activities and halted real estate transactions.
Has the data been affected?
According to MP Igor Fris, who heads the parliamentary working group investigating the consequences of the attack, there was no data leak or modification.
“No changes, modifications, or destruction of information have occurred. 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 registry architecture being compromised raises questions about the effectiveness of the existing protection system.
Notaries have not been able to conduct any real estate transactions for over a week. The following are also impossible:
- Registration of businesses and public organizations;
- Change of residence;
- Obtaining extracts from the land cadastre.
Private notary Natalia Kozaeva notes that only a limited list of notarial acts, such as certification of wills or powers of attorney, is temporarily permitted.
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, manipulations can be easily tracked.
“Talk about the risk of illegal seizure of property is manipulation,” the Ministry of Justice noted.
A parliamentary working group is developing recommendations to strengthen the security of state registers to avoid the recurrence of similar incidents.
Despite the optimistic forecasts of officials, the restoration of the registers may take several weeks. During this time, the government plans to:
- Develop more reliable cyber defense mechanisms;
- Check the vulnerabilities of the existing infrastructure;
- Create backup systems for uninterrupted operation of registries in crisis situations.
