© ISOPIX
During the night from Sunday to Monday, the Department of Defense admitted that it had suffered a cyber attack, which appears to be serious. Some activities of the ministry were paralyzed for several days.
MTMsource: Belgian
The defense on Thursday discovered an attack on its computer network with access to the Internet. Quarantine measures were soon taken to isolate the affected areas. A military spokesman said that the priority is the continuation of the work of the defense network.”
“Our teams have been mobilized throughout the weekend to get the problem under control, continue our activities and warn our partners,” the spokesman, Commander Olivier Ceferin, added on Sunday. “The priority is to keep the network running. We will continue to monitor the situation.”
The Defense Ministry said the attack was the result of a vulnerability in the widely used Apache Log4j program. The vulnerability emerged just before the end of the week and poses a significant risk to corporate networks around the world as many well-known applications use affected software to keep ‘logs’.
The spokesman said: “The defense will not provide any additional information at this stage.” He declined to comment further on the origin of the dangerous cyber attack.
Belga concluded that defense email traffic had been disrupted since at least Friday. Since then, the news agency has not received any further emails from the ministry.
According to Israeli cybersecurity solutions provider Check Point Software Technologies, a group of Iranian-linked hackers called Charming Kitten or APT 35 exploited the Log4j flaw to launch attacks against seven targets in Israel, including government websites.
Tech companies monitor whether their apps are working properly via Log4j. If there is a malfunction somewhere in a program, an error message is sent via Log4j to the manufacturer, who can then tell if a repair is needed somewhere. Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Tesla, Minecraft, and Twitter, among others, use Log4j.
