Belarusian websites under fire

An increased number of cyber attacks against websites of the Belarus government and the business community has been registered recently. The information was released by Sergei Kaparikha, Deputy Head of the Operations and Analysis Center under the Belarus President, in his speech before participants of the 18th research to practice conference Complex Data Protection 2013 in Brest on 22 May, BelTA has learned.

The cyber attacks target websites specializing in economics, defense, international politics, science and technology as well as confidential information of citizens. “The Operations and Analysis Center has repeatedly prevented attempts to get unauthorized access using special software to information resources of various government agencies and organizations,” explained the official.

In his words, in view of the Union State cyber space integration with the global information space more and more cyber attacks target critical installations. An analysis carried out by the Operations and Analysis Center has confirmed it.

“The Center has established tight cooperation with virtually all the government agencies and ensures the safety of the resources, which are part of the information environment of government agencies,” stressed Sergei Kaparikha. Today’s priority is protecting information in the most important information and telecommunication systems, which have an essential influence on the state security in the information sphere. With this in mind a nationwide system to counteract cyber attacks has been created in Belarus. It allows evaluating the attacks that target specific government agencies.

Yet any solutions to counteract cyber attacks are destined to fall if the solutions are limited to the Belarusian part of the Internet. “This is why the Operations and Analysis Center has established cooperation with foreign agencies that perform similar counteraction functions,” said the official. In particular, the Center has established cooperation with Kaspersky’s Lab to investigate the operation of an international cyber grid, attacks from which targeted systems that contain data about research and development projects and the operation of the banking industry.