A distributed denial of service attack is said to have disrupted few of the government websites in Finland on Sunday last week. And authorities say that the denial of the service attack was the biggest to have taken place in the past few months.
Sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders say that the first to bear the DDoS attack impact was Finland’s online identity verification site Suomi.fi. And later websites such as the Finnish National Insurance Institution (Kela), the Population Registry Center and the few of the websites belonging to the law enforcement were left deeply impacted.
Valtori, a website belonging to Government ICT Center says that the incident took place in the evening hours of Sunday at probably at 4:30 PM. And it prevented users from logging in to Suomi. fi services which caused problems to several government-run sites by late Sunday. However, by early morning of Monday this week, all services were reportedly full restored.
“This is the biggest cyber incident witnessed by Finland in the past few months and we need to think on how to prepare better”, said Pasi Lehmus, the CEO of Valtori.
It has to be notified over here that not all government websites were affected by the incident and the defense ministry website was down for a while due to a technical snag and not due to the attack impact.
Note 1- Residents of almost two apartment buildings in Lappeenranta, located in Eastern Finland suffered a cold blow when the heaters in their residences stopped working due to the impact of a DDoS attack. Security analysts later discovered that the environmental control systems of the automated buildings were blocked by unusual traffic which made the main circuitry board restart consistently on a formal note.
Note 2- As the systems in two buildings were managed by Valtia, the CEO of the company Simo Rounela later confirmed that the central heating and hot water systems in both the buildings were impacted.
Note 3-Fortunately, the day was not so cold to the residents of Lappeenranta on the day of impact. Otherwise, material and life damage could have taken place. The residents of the two buildings were quickly relocated until the systems were fully restored which almost took 15 days time frame.
