The Slovak real estate cadastre has been paralysed for the third day, reports SME.sk. While a short-term outage may not bring any significant restrictions, a long-term one can mean serious problems.
Today, Slovakia is dealing with one of the biggest hacker attacks in history. It malfunctioned the information systems of the Office of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre of the Slovak Republic. The outage of online services operated by the Office should have occurred during the long weekend. The Ministry of the Interior, whose department includes the cadastral departments of district offices, initially claimed that it was only a minor outage.
However, on January 6, the Finsider portal published information that the Office systems had become the target of a cyber attack. One of the employees of the office revealed that the management forbade them to turn on the computers and informed them about the attack. On Wednesday, the Ministry of the Interior also confirmed it.
Portal Živé.sk reported that the hackers are asking for a seven-digit dollar ransom to restore access to the data. The second option is to restore the system from backups. Portal Živé reported that the cadastre lacks comprehensive data backups that would enable quick system recovery. It can take many weeks or months. That the office did not have everything ready for such a situation is also indicated by the fact that the system is not working for the third day and the public has no relevant information. The extent of the damage is currently unknown and will be revealed only in the coming days.
A dysfunctional cadastre can also have an impact on the mortgage market. The two biggest banks say they are still issuing and approving mortgages. However, the problem arises in the next step. "The cadastre outage has the greatest negative impact on clients who already have a mortgage approved and need to draw it, but cannot submit documents from the real estate cadastre. In this, unfortunately, we are fully dependent on the functionality of the cadastre and its current data," VÚB bank spokesman Dominik Miša told INDEX. Slovenská sporiteľňa also confirmed the suspension of loans.
Measurement via GPS is also crippled, as surveyors cannot get to the corrections of the reference stations, which also fall under the cadastre system. Problems can also arise with sales contracts, as the buyer will not be able to fulfil his obligations for objective reasons.
