The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Protection of Personal Data, Milan Marinović, stated that for now there is no information that personal data of citizens has been compromised in the hacker attack on EPS, but that the supervision of inspectors of the Commissioner's Service is still ongoing.
"We were immediately informed by the EPS about the hacker attack with the words that "as a precaution" they are calling us to take preliminary investigation actions because they are not sure if personal data was compromised in the attack," said Marinović.
As he stated, that supervision is still ongoing because the end of the "system upgrade" is waiting.
"It's going slowly. For now, there is no information that the personal data of citizens has been compromised, and in the event that this happens, we will react in accordance with the law," said Marinović.
Under attack since March
Cyber security expert Ivan Marković stated a few days ago that the Forum on Security in the Balkans determined through various analyzes on the dark web that the data of the Electric Power Company of Serbia (EPS) was compromised in the period from March to October last year, six months before EPS announced that is recovering from a hacker attack.
On December 19, Elektroprivreda Srbije informed the public that it was recovering from the hacker attack and assured that none of the personal data was contaminated, but that the databases containing citizens' data were isolated.
Marković reminded that the forum was doing analysis, and then through the SOC radar they saw numerous addresses with the email EPS, which could indicate that someone has a virus on the computer used by a person from the company.
"Further checks revealed information that data was compromised from March to August, that internal systems were "compromised," he said.
When asked what documents are in the possession of the attackers of the Kilin Group, Marković stated that there are data marked as confidential, and if someone has such data, it means that they accessed someone in EPS with high privileges.
What was published?
Qilin Group, which at the end of December 2023 took responsibility for the hacker attack on the Electric Power Company of Serbia, published a little more than 34 gigabytes of documents that it claims to have downloaded during the attack on this public company.
For now, there is no confirmation of the authenticity of the published documents. The fact that one gigabyte contains about 10.000 documents tells us about the quantity.
According to unconfirmed data, the hackers who blocked EPS online services and stole their documents demanded a "ransom" of about 7 million euros, and when they did not receive it, they began to publish the documents publicly, on the Internet, as part of the Quilin group's blog, online Onion.
Elektroprivreda Srbije, nor the Government of Serbia as its founder, did not announce themselves on this occasion.
Radio Free Europe states that the questions addressed to the Prosecutor's Office for High-Tech Crime, which is leading the investigation into the hacker attack on EPS, remained without a concrete answer.
"We will not make statements during the taking of evidentiary actions in this case until the moment when their publication will not affect or jeopardize our further proceedings," the Prosecutor's Office for High-Tech Crime states.
