Lithuania cyber attacks: Round two

Jul 22, 2008
In cooperation with BNS

VILNIUS- Lithuania was hit by a second wave of cyber attacks as the state tax office’s website was swarmed with requests in attempt to crash the website, losing valuable tax data. No damage was found.

However, head of the tax inspectorate Gediminas Vysniauskis said in a statement that he believed the attacks were planned in advance.  

At the time of the first investigation, the hacking servers appeared to be located in Romania, however officials believe that the attacks were not based there, but merely routed through.  

"Addresses of servers, which generated the requests, were blocked immediately... the preliminary analysis shows the servers were located in Romania," the tax office said.

The attacks are similar to the attacks sustained by Estonia in April and May 2007.  

The attacks are of a different nature than those of June 2008, in which hundreds of official Lithuanian websites were hacked into and vandalized with soviet symbols and anti-Lithuanian propaganda. Officials believe that the attack was provoked by Lithuania’s decision to ban the use of Soviet symbols and the Soviet anthem.

Estoniawas also faced with a similar attack. Officials then came to the same conclusion, that the governmental decision to remove the bronze Soviet soldier statue from the capital of Tallinn provoked anger from the Russian community in Estoniaand Moscow.

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