Montenegro will receive a Regional Center for the fight against cybercrime and cyber security, which will start operating in the spring of next year. It will bring together experts from Europe, but also from the region, and it will be mostly aimed at education and providing advisory assistance to competent authorities in cyberspace. Serbia would also benefit from an institution of this kind. Researcher "Share" Foundation Bojan Perkov agrees with this statement and tells "Vremena" portal that such an institution would help, because "staff education is necessary", first of all in the public sector, but also in security investigative bodies.
As he says, he believes that there is enough "professional civil-scientific public" that could help because cyber problems are more and more common, so educating employees is necessary.
In the past few days, Serbia witnessed warnings that cyber attacks can happen to anyone, so the website of the Republic Geodetic Institute (RGZ), which was out of order for about a week, became a target. Probably under public pressure, RGZ issued a statement and explained that the "ransomware" virus was to blame for everything.
This type of virus locks important databases on computers, and asks for a certain amount of money to be paid in exchange for a key that can be used to access the data again. If the data was backed up, i.e. duplicated, protected and saved in another place, it was saved. Otherwise, the only thing left is to pay the requested amount.
Perkov advises that "such ransoms should not be paid", because on the one hand, this is how cybercrime is financed, and on the other hand, it creates fear as to whether the key will be returned after payment.
The RGZ website is active again, but there is a justified suspicion that there has been a leak of citizens' personal data. In that case, RGZ would be obliged to inform the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Protection of Personal Data, but also to inform citizens whose data is at risk.
RGZ claim that there is no reason to worry.
Also, the Commissioner can himself request to carry out supervision, as he did in 2020 after a large data leak from the Public Utility Company.
In any case, the story of the fall of the RGZ leads, through the "ransomware", back to the lack of employee education. That virus probably got into the computers precisely because one of the people working in this institution opened or downloaded something that they should not have opened, and especially not downloaded. Of course, human errors are always possible, but with better education they would certainly be reduced.
For the fight against cybercrime, which "ransomware" certainly is, the special prosecutor's office for High Technology Crime is responsible in Serbia. Vremen's interlocutor believes that they "have the capacity" but, as he says, they have more and more work to do, and they alone cover the entire country.
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