Albania is still experiencing daily cyber attacks following a serious attack from Iran in 2022, Prime Minister Edi Rama said at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday.
The attack brought critical digital government infrastructure offline and resulted in the siphoning of data which has been periodically released into the public domain.
“Last year, we were attacked by Iran, massively, very heavily. Of course, we paid more attention, at every step, to a thorough investigation assisted by the Microsoft team, the FBI team and other experts before coming up with this allegation based on facts. And we are still under attack, practically day after day,” Rama said.
He added that, thankfully, they were able to prevent the complete shutdown of systems and the deletion of all data, which he said was the primary aim of the attack.
The incident led to Iranian diplomats being expelled from the country and a raft of sanctions against those purportedly behind the attack in Tehran.
One of the country’s main banks, Credins, was also subject to a cyber attack at the end of December. It resulted in customers being unable to access their accounts and card payments being unavailable.
The bank said they were working with local specialists and “international partners” to combat the attack as well as to liaise with the relevant regulatory and supervisory bodies.
Earlier in January, Defence Minister Nikeo Peleshi said that a military cyber defence unit will be built and become operational.
“The year 2023 will be the year when the military cyber defence unit will have completed 100% of its human capacities. We are in the recruitment process, we have changed the structure, we have tripled the number of experts in the structure, now we are recruiting new cyber security experts, and we have increased salaries.”
(Alice Taylor | Exit.al)
Source: euractiv.com
