Swedish authorities hit by cyber attacks: media

In recent years, several public-sector institutions in Sweden have been severely hit by blackmail viruses, local media reported Thursday.

Blackmail viruses infect computers and hold information ransom. In Sweden, at least 80 authorities and 130 municipalities have lost digital files in blackmail-virus attacks, newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported. In some cases, authorities' servers were down for up to a week following the cyber attacks.

In 2015, for instance, a virus knocked out a server that belonged to Sweden's National Agency for Education and that contained 20 million documents. Staff members could not access their digital files and documents for nearly a week.

"It's serious since it took so long before the system was up and running again," said Thomas Soderberg, acting head of IT and support at the National Agency for Education.

He added: "We now have better methods and a better authorization structure which allows for a more efficient reset, so if we were to be hit again we would be able to solve a similar situation much faster than before."

In some cases, for instance at the Swedish Employment Agency, files were permanently lost as a result of cyber attacks. However, in a majority of the blackmail-virus cases mapped out by Dagens Nyheter, there were security copies of the files held ransom.

None of the authorities or municipalities surveyed said they ended up paying ransom money. However, at the same time, resolving the virus attacks takes up significant amounts of time and resources and hinders employees' work. Endit