Cyber attack against key Bulgarian institutions still ongoing: official

A cyber attack targeting websites of key state institutions in Bulgaria is still ongoing, an official said here on Tuesday.

Valeri Borisov, Deputy Minister of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications, told reporters that websites of institutions such as the Ministry of Interior, State Agency for National Security, parliament, president and Central Election Commission (CEC) have experienced difficulties as a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which initially hit the website of CEC on Oct. 25.

"A website of an important state institution was attacked two billion times within 24 hours," Borisov said on the sidelines of a conference on e-government.

There was no way to count how many attacks were made against all websites in the country during the last 10 days, he added.

"I want to assure you that all important information systems of the country are protected reliably," he added, however.

Bulgarian authorities have experts who know and can fight such crimes, Borisov said, adding Bulgaria's National Computer Security Incidents Response Team contacted its U.S. counterpart and exchanged information.

During the first DDoS attack against CEC, which began on the day when Bulgaria held local elections and referendum on electronic voting, over 530 million requests were made to the Internet portal of CEC within 10 hours, a quarter of them from IP addresses originating in Vietnam, Turkey and the United States, officials said.

In 2013, when a similar attack was experienced, authorities registered a total of 12 million queries a month, officials said. Endit