Situation in Latvia's cyberspace has never before been so tense - Cert.lv

RIGA - Never before the situation in Latvia's cyberspace has been so tense, Baiba Kaskina, head of Information Technology Security Incident Response Institution Cert.lv.

"The situation in Latvia's cyberspace has never before been so tense," Kaskina said, adding that the Latvian cyberspace is attacked practically on a daily basis, with around 1,000 targets being hit on some days. Most of these attacks, however, go unnoticed thanks to solid defense systems, she said.

In Kaskina's words, the most worrying are serious cyberattacks compromising the IT systems of companies providing services to state institutions and critical infrastructure. "We have uncovered several such attacks. We have been repelling them as far as we could, but there are no guarantees that there are no other attacks. This is a real danger which can strike us at any time," the Cert.lv chief said. 

Kaskina also said that the hackers staging denial-of-service attacks and similar activities do not even attempt to hide, but that more serious incidents involving attacks on critical infrastructure suggest of connections with Russian intelligence agencies, but event in those cases the attackers do not bother to hide their identity as they used to.

The Cert.lv chief indicated that during the first months of the Ukraine war there were fewer commercially motivated attacks. "There was an impression that the perpetrators involved in commercially motivated attacks have been redeployed to a different front... Now, in the summer, the situation has evened out again and the commercially motivated attacks are back in higher numbers," Kaskina said.

She also noted that these months have provided the opportunity to prepare for future eventualities. 

Cert.lv is a structural unit of the University of Latvia's Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, responsible to the Ministry of Defense. The mission of Cert.lv is to promote information technology security in Latvia.