Scandal! Hungarian foreign affairs are no secrets to Putin’s hackers

Back on 20 December 2021, Péter Szijjártó proudly flaunted the friendship medal he received from the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov Sergey upon Putin’s order. The Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade did so despite the fact that he had been long aware of the Russian Secret Intelligence Services’ cyberattacks targeting the information network of the Hungarian Foreign Affairs and Trade, which is happened to be governed by Szijjártó himself. 

According to Direkt36, it was already known by the second part of the year that the Russians had fully compromised the information and internal mail systems of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including hacking an encrypted network that served the purpose of securely storing top-secret political documents which were otherwise supposed be handled with utmost confidentiality. 

Based on the news outlet information,

these attacks targeting the Hungarain Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade still continued into January 2022.

Former officers of the Hungarian Secret Intelligence Service informed the news outlet that upon examining the traces of the cyberattacks, it can be almost certainly stated that they were committed by a group of hackers that work for the Russian Secret Intelligence Service. 

These hackers are employed both by the formerly Putin-owned Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and GRU, the Russian Military Secret Intelligence Service. According to sources,

Hungarian government agencies have been long aware of this hacker group for their decade-long malicious activity against Hungarian government networks.