North Korea hacked a Hungarian governmental organisation!

The victim was the Hungarian Development Centre, which has to start its administration from scratch because, as it claims, it was hacked mid-July by North Koreans who destroyed its entire digital database.

The server on which the North Korean hackers destroyed all data has been in operation since 2014 and contained all official documentation, contracts, invoices, corporate software, 168 óra reported.

The paper asked both the Development Centre and its supervisory body, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, about the exact date of the attack

but received no answer as of yet. 

The Hungarian Development Centre‘s task is to monitor European tenders financed by the European Structural and Investment Funds. Furthermore, it has to inform public administration, municipalities, and the NGO sector about the available funding and tender terms. It cooperates not only with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade but also with the National Development Ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture, several governmental organisations, as well as NGOs, sports and other organisations.

The Development Centre operates the Tenders in Hungarian (Pályázatok Magyarul) website as well, but the website functioned during the attack, so it was probably not targeted. Nevertheless, the documents for

tenders worth billions of HUF (EUR millions) were destroyed.

Interestingly, no government body responded to the inquiry of 168 óra. The confirmation on the report came from Dénes Debreczeny, technical director of the Hungarian Rugby Association, an association impacted by the incident in several ways. He learned indirectly that the hacking originated from North Korea but fortunately, they have a backup of most of their official documents on another server. He stated that they asked the Ministry of Human Capacities to help them recover and replace the lost documents.

168 óra‘s source could not tell the exact date of the attack, but

it was probably mid-July.

He also said that the original data and their backup should not have been stored on the same server, but in this case, that is what happened. This is why all is destroyed now.

HERE you find what a Hungarian journalist wrote about North Korea after his visit, while HERE you can read about the Hungarian students who won the Global Legal Hackathon with a data protection software.

Source: 168 óra