2024-06-01 15:53 update: 2024-06-03, 15:04
Photo: PAP/Tytus Żmijewski
The Polish government has taken steps to protect the Polish Press Agency against cyber-attacks in the future following a Friday incident, the digitisation minister has told PAP.
In the early afternoon on Friday, PAP was targeted by hackers, who sent out a fake report through the PAP online service claiming that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk had announced a partial mobilisation of 200,000 men who were going to be sent to Ukraine.
The report was immediately cancelled by PAP but was re-released minutes later. The second release was also cancelled.
"Steps have been taken to protect PAP against similar situations in the future," Krzysztof Gawkowski, the digitisation minister, told PAP on Saturday.
"We already have initial information confirmed on how the attack on the Polish Press Agency was carried out," Gawkowski said. "It was planned and executed over a longer period of time. In the attack, malware was to hack the accounts of one of PAP employees. The malware was designed to capture passwords and later to publish false information."
Gawkowski went on to say that "the Internal Security Agency and other services are preparing a report."
He pledged that "today PAP is already safe," adding that PAP's systems are being checked in case someone tries to "repeat an incident like yesterday's."
Gawkowski said all indications show that the attack "originated from the Russian side."
"Russian services are carrying out a broad campaign as part of the destabilisation of European Union countries before the elections to the European Parliament."
PAP's liquidator Marek Blonski and PAP's editor-in-chief Wojciech Tumidalski wrote in a joint statement on Friday afternoon that necessary procedures had been launched immediately after the incident and that "the path used to insert the fake report into PAP service had been identified and blocked." (PAP)
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