Bulgarian PM announces special measures to protect computer networks

World
Europe

Bulgaria is taking special measures to protect its computer networks, the country's Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said on Wednesday.

"The cyber attacks are scary," he said at the annual meeting of the heads of diplomatic missions of the country abroad.

World practice has shown that there are no impenetrable networks, he said.

Borissov explained that he had met with hackers and they told him that "in practice it is hard to protect our networks”.

Another issue is that adequate protection costs enormous amounts of money, he added.

Bulgaria has suffered from severe cyber attacks in recent years. /VCG Photo

Now, the State Agency for National Security (SANS) is dealing with the issue, said Borissov.

However, he did not reveal any specific details.

In autumn 2015, websites of some Bulgarian institutions such as the Ministry of Interior, SANS and the Central Election Commission (CEC), all experienced difficulties as a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

During the first DDoS attack against CEC, which began on the day Bulgaria held its local elections and a referendum on electronic voting, over 530 million requests were made to the Internet portal of CEC within ten hours, a quarter of them from IP addresses originating in Vietnam, Turkey and the United States, officials said.

(Source: Xinhua)