Energy Group Ignitis Hit on July 9
The nationwide Rogers communications outage in Canada on July 8 was said to be caused by a network failure after a maintenance update. The very next day in Lithuania, the state-owned energy group Ignitis was hit by “the biggest cyber attack in a decade”.
Ignitis said it had experienced DDoS attacks, affecting the operation of its websites and digital services. (DDoS Attack means “Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack” and is a cybercrime in which the attacker floods a server with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing connected online services and sites.) However, the attacks were taken under control by noon the same day.
“There were no recorded hacks into the systems or other adverse effects,” the group said in a statement.
Ignitis later resumed digital services for customers, but the cyber attack on the infrastructure continued. “We have experienced intense DDoS attacks over the last two weeks. We see that when individual attacks fail, hackers choose us as the only target and mobilize all their capabilities,” Edvinas Kerza, the head of business resilience at Ignitis Group, said in the statement. He noted that “On top of the fact that we have essentially become the only target currently under attack in Lithuania, new, previously unseen networks of botnets have been activated, clogging up the channels of internet service providers”.
Lithuanian institutions and businesses have been hit by wide-range cyber attacks since late June when the country began applying EU sanctions on transit to Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the Baltic coast.
Killnet hackers, which Lithuanian officials say are linked to the Russian intelligence services, have claimed responsibility for the attacks. On July 9, the group announced its attack on the Ignitis Group’s ESO subsidiary on Telegram.
