site.bta6,100-Plus Cyber Incidents Registered in Public Sphere in 2023

More than 6,100 cyber incidents have been registered in the public sphere since the beginning of 2023, Minister of e-Government Alexander Yolovski said here on Tuesday. Yolovski participated in a presentation of the results of a project related to the development of a national coordination centre and a Bulgarian cybersecurity ecosystem.

The Minister specified that these are incidents related only to the public sector and do not affect critical infrastructure. As an example of the increasing cyber threats, he pointed to data from 2022, when some 4,100 incidents were registered.

Yolovski said: "Digitization and cybersecurity are two sides of the same coin. Digitization is impossible without the flip side, which is cybersecurity". He noted that data sharing and cyber security are becoming more and more relevant in Bulgaria and across Europe due to the constant development of technologies, including AI.

The Minister said that no cybersecurity strategy should overlook investments in services, equipment and in people and added: "We can easily buy certain products, implement certain solutions, but if we don't have the people to back them up, the job is not done. That is why it's important to learn from the mistakes of the past and make invest even more in people".

He said that Bulgaria has good specialists in the field of information and communication technologies, while there is a lack of enough specialists in both IT and cybersecurity at the EU level.

Yolovski listed three problems in this area that led to Bulgaria taking action to improve:

The first took place some years ago, when the country experienced problems with the Commercial Register. This led to the creation of a repository for backup copies of critical data, with a total of 36 administrations currently storing backup copies of their data there.

The second was the increased number of DDoS attacks since the start of the war in Ukraine. Yolovski reported that Bulgaria has taken measures to create and upgrade a secure internet node, so that a centralized service protects against such attacks.

The third was a data leak from the National Revenue Agency after a successful hacking attempt in July 2019. "After this leak, the NRA made an incredibly important investment in renewing its entire infrastructure," Yolovski said.

"To protect ourselves in the future, we need to make investments now," the Minister concluded.

The main objective of the project presented on Tuesday, Deploying the Network of National Coordination Centres with Member States, is related to the development of a national coordination centre in Bulgaria and an active and engaged Bulgarian cybersecurity ecosystem with many partners in the public and private sectors as well as in academia. The National Coordination Centre will serve as the national point of contact for all cybersecurity-related topics under the project. A financial support programme is also planned to assist small and medium-sized enterprises in adopting the latest cybersecurity solutions.