Russian hackers attacked the websites of Bulgarian institutions, media and companies

A hacker attack, possibly by /Russian hacking group, on the websites of a number of Bulgarian companies, media and institutions, including that of the Presidency. The hacker group KILLNET itself announced that it had hacked the websites.

The Presidency said there was only a temporary restriction on access to the head of state's website. The Prosecutor's office is conducting an investigation. The Prosecutor General, Ivan Geshev, said that the Prosecutor’s office together with the security services, will protect the Bulgarian national interest and that of our European partners from harmful interference.

The attack was of the DDoS type. This is an old hacking technique and, interestingly, it is something like the handwriting of Russian hackers. In this attack, millions of requests are made from infected devices to access a particular site in a very short time - a few seconds. So people who want to get into that site fail to do so. For this reason, the attack itself has been defined as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

In this case, it started shortly before noon on October 15. What we have learned is that there were over 1 million and 300,000 thousand access requests to the Presidency site within 1 second and 3 hundredths.

So for a few minutes, access to the head of state's website was slowed or restricted. The President's Press Office said that at no time was the content of the website compromised, only the access to the website was hindered. Measures have been taken to reduce the impact of the attack.

Another site, that of a company in the transport industry, had 2,864,000 access requests per second and 9 hundredths. It was accessed within 3 minutes and 23 seconds and the protection worked.

There have been similar attacks on the websites of various ministries and institutions, but no sites have crashed and no systems have been breached. The Prosecutor's office has launched an investigation and ordered an inspection to be carried out by the Chief Directorate for Combatting Organised Crime (CDCOC) and the State Agency for National Security (SANS).

“The attack came the Russian city of Magnitogorsk. The Sofia city Prosecutor’s office has ordered an investigation. We are working together with our colleagues from the CDCOC and SANS. The Presidency or the Presidency website was not under hacker attack here, as many media reports state. The aim of the attack was the Bulgarian state, to be honest. The Bulgarian state as part of the European family. Because the target of this hacking attack, or of these hacking attacks, are numerous ministries. Including the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice, the Constitutional Court," Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev said.

Deputy Prosecutor General, Borislav Sarafov, who is also the Head of the National Investigation Service, said that the cyber attack came from the Russian city of Magnitogorsk and added that it was not yet clear whether it was made by a single hacker or a group of hackers. He explained that the attack has been traced back to its beginning via specialized software.