Cyber attacks in Latvia to remain high - Cert.lv

RIGA - The number of cyber attacks in Latvia will remain high in the future, said Baiba Kaskina, head of the information technology security incident prevention institution Cert.lv, in an interview on Latvian Television this morning.

She pointed out that the threat level in Latvian cyberspace has been high since last spring. "We still need to be very vigilant, both to protect ourselves from unfriendly hackers from neighboring countries and from commercially motivated attacks," Kaskina said.

The Cert.lv head noted that Latvia is now hit by "waves" of various scams practically every week. "Almost everyone has received a text message that they have to go to court, or that a package has not been delivered. Unfortunately, all this is washing over us," said Kaskina, adding that quite a lot of people fall for these scams because they are credible, including the pages set up to extract access data are very well designed.

According to Kaskina, the number of attacks on public authorities also increased in September. "There are a lot of denial-of-service attacks, which are usually organized by pro-Russian hackers, attempts to hack into systems, attempts to infiltrate, as well as quite a lot of information operations where there was no attack at all or it was unsuccessful but is presented as a successful attack with stolen data. (...) Put it all together and you have attempts to undermine reputations, attempts to intimidate. Unfortunately, we see all this in the cyber environment," she said.

Asked whether the level of cyber-attacks would remain high in the future, the head of Cert.lv admitted that there was no expectation that the situation would change in the near future. "We just have to be ready to defend ourselves," Kaskina stressed.

She also noted that the situation is similar in the other Baltic countries, and that all NATO countries have suffered from these attacks in recent months.

Cert.lv is a unit of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Latvia, whose tasks are to maintain a unified picture of the activities taking place in the electronic information space, to provide support in preventing or coordinating the prevention of information technology security incidents in the IP address areas of Latvia and in the ".lv" domain name zone.