At least a part of civil, credit and real estate transactions in Ukraine were temporarily on hold after 18 electronic data registers managed by the Justice Ministry crashed, possibly because of hackers.
Among the databases that went down are registers containing information about real estate ownership, property, powers of attorney and other highly sensitive personal data, paralyzing real estate and credit transactions in the country.
The prosecutor general launched an investigation into what it referred to as “unauthorized interference” into the registers, but employees of the state company responsible for database management believe they‘ve become targets of illegal data harvesting. They suspect information has been copied with the intention of misuse.
On Oct. 1, Justice Ministry announced that registers managed by the state-owned Information Center are not accessible “for technical reasons.” The next day, the general prosecutor’s office said the matter was more serious as the Justice Ministry servers had been hacked.
The events ”caused significant property damage to the state budget and the citizens of Ukraine who were unable to enter into contracts for sales, to give power of attorney, to register their property rights and so on,” the general prosecutor’s press service said. The Interior Ministry is investigating.
The failure of registers made it impossible to conduct proper registration of civil acts and notary services, among others, Justice Minister Olena Lukash said. According to the ministry’s press service, on Oct. 3 a gradual recovery of the system began, and up to 75 percent of the information was recovered. Despite the databases’ failure, authorities were able to register marriages, births and deaths manually.
By mid-day on Oct.3, registration of operations with real estate also became possible. “My colleagues received calls, and they were told it was possible to conduct (the deals),” president of the Realtors Association of Ukraine Serhiy Zlyden said.
Employees of the state-run Information Center, in a letter signed by 18 of them and released on Oct.3, said that unauthorized hacking of the system was pre-organized theft of personal data. “It was not just a hack, but a raider attack on state registers containing all the confidential information about citizens of Ukraine, by unknown persons,” the letter says.
The letter said that on Sept. 23 the Information Center got a new director, Leonid Bohdanov, who asked on the first day for a copy of all databases. Bohdanov was not available for comment at the time Kyiv Post went to print.
Justice Ministry’s representatives denied accusations of illegal data harvesting. “As a result of unauthorized access to the network of these registers, their routing was stopped. Registers themselves are not affected, no third parties have touched them, but routes were damaged,” Lukash said, according to Ukrinform state-owned news agency.
Lukash believes that employees could have written the letter because of an ongoing audit of the enterprise. “Due to the fact that the audit results were pretty disappointing for those who were engaged in the spending of public funds in a very impudent way, some of them, having access and all possibilities to influence the registers’ routing, a few days ago did what they did,” Lukash said.
However, Information Center deputy director Vadym Khoruzhenko, one of the letter signatories, denies the allegation of money embezzlement in the state company, Ukrainska Pravda writes.
Kyiv Post staff writer Kateryna Kapliuk can be reached at [email protected].
