Last Saturday,  15th of October, Bulgaria woke up to the news that several Bulgarian websites of state institutions, media platforms, telecom providers, and airports had been a target of a cyberattack from the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) type, making them inaccessible for several hours. This is the latest Bulgarian cyberattack after the hacking attempt against The Bulgarian Food Safety Agency this August and the ransomware attack against Bulgarian posts earlier this year in April.

Worldwide scale cyber threats have significantly increased since the start of the pandemic. In addition, Ukraine’s ongoing war further reinforced the demand for institutions to take better measures and invest more resources into the war against hackers.

Among the most common methods that hackers use to get access to sensitive information or to take control of a certain computer system are phishing attacks, spear phishing attacks, ransomware, and man-in-the-middle. According to the Ministry of e-Governance, 80% of all malicious attempts in Bulgaria are phishing attacks and about 57% of all Bulgarian institutions have to face and prevent hacker attacks on a daily or monthly basis.

To put the recent Bulgarian cyberattack in context, by discussing the level of cybersecurity in the country and whether its institutions are prepared to deal with different scenarios of cybercrime,  Investor.bg, a Bulgarian finance and business media platform, gathered a panel of experts at the event Tech of Tomorrow. The discussion was joined by Dimitar Pavlov – Cybersecurity Manager at A1, a Bulgarian telecom service provider, Vihren Slavchev – Executive Director of Mnemonica, IT security and data storage advisor company, Bozhidar Bozhanov – Member of Parliament and a former minister of e-government, and Spas Ivanov, Managing Partner at IT Baseline, data security, and protection IT company.