Acting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan stated on Thursday that the operations of the National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI) halted following a cyberattack could resume next week. He noted that the migration to the government cloud is nearing completion and that a security assessment of the new infrastructure will be conducted on Friday.
At the same time, the Prime Minister gave assurances that, according to information available so far, data regarding the properties has not been compromised.
"Regarding another topical issue the cyberattack that blocked the National Cadastre Agency's databasework is currently underway to remediate the situation. According to information from the teams involvedspecifically the Special Telecommunications Service, the Romanian Intelligence Service, and the National Cyber Security Directorate data related to properties has not been affected. The transfer of the application running the database to the government cloud is currently nearing completion. Tomorrow, the Special Telecommunications Service will conduct a security assessment of this application, and the National Cyberint Center will perform a cyber audit of the new infrastructure to determine if additional security measures are required. Based on the action plan agreed upon by the responding institutions and the National Cadastre Agency, the estimate is that the Agency's operations will resume and database access will be restored sometime next week," said Bolojan.
The interim prime minister pointed out that the Agency's operations have been stalled for a week, and by next Tuesday, the period of inactivity will reach two weeks.
"Initially, believing the issue could be resolved quickly, I thought that extending the Cadastre Agency's daily operating hours or working Saturdays would allow us to make up for the days the database was down. However, given the prolonged duration of the outage, I believe that upcoming parliamentary discussions regarding an extension are necessary; this would allow for the validity of contracts signed last year which were due to close by the end of this month to be extended, thereby ensuring that the parties involved can still benefit from the reduced VAT rate. The extension should cover at least the period of downtime, and the specific terms will be determined by my colleagues in Parliament," Bolojan explained.
He further pointed out that the incident at the Cadastre Agency serves as "a lesson for everyone involved in managing this data a lesson about adhering to protection standards, avoiding fragmentation across institutions, ensuring competent personnel in these areas, employing the best security measures, and constantly updating the applications used."
"A meeting of the National Directorate for Cybersecurity also took place today, involving over 120 authorities; it was made crystal clear to them that compliance with standards is mandatory and that adherence to these standards will be strictly monitored in the coming period, so as to limit potential attacks that could affect the operations of public institutions or their databases," Bolojan added.
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