Cyberattacks against public institutions

Nearly 40% of 5,000 cyberattacks in Europe per year are against public institutions

Nearly 40% of the approximately 5,000 cyberespionage attacks analyzed in Europe were directed against European public institutions. Most often, the attacks involved or were supported by “hostile states,” the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) wrote in a report.

According to the document dedicated to cyber threats in Europe for the period July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025, “these groups are conducting cyber espionage campaigns against public authorities, while also trying to influence public opinion through disinformation.”

In August, several European countries said they had been hit by Salt Typhoon, a massive hacking campaign believed to be led by China's Ministry of State Security, which had previously severely affected the US telecommunications sector and some federal agencies.

In May, the Netherlands warned of an active Russian cyberespionage campaign, and the Czech government condemned China for a cyberattack on the country's foreign ministry that exposed thousands of unclassified emails.

Passengers at airports in Brussels, Berlin and London recently had to endure serious delays due to a cyberattack on the supplier Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in and boarding systems.

A little further back in time, during the presidential elections in Romania, authorities in our northern neighbor announced that the country's electoral infrastructure had been the subject of more than 85,000 cyberattacks in a week.

Bulgarian institutions are also not left out of this trend.

Back in June 2019, the systems of the National Revenue Agency (NRA) were breached, as a result of which hackers acquired personal and financial data of about 5 million Bulgarian citizens – names, personal identification numbers, addresses, income, pension information, liabilities, etc. To this day, this is one of the largest breaches in our history.

Three years later, in 2022, massive DDoS attacks hit a number of websites of various ministries, the Presidency, and the Constitutional Court, rendering them inaccessible for days. The attack was linked to the pro-Russian hacker group KillNet.

That same year, Bulgarian Post also fell victim to a suspected Russian cyberattack after a cryptovirus affected the company's central systems. This paralyzed work at post offices across the country and blocked the payment of pensions and social benefits for several weeks.

In early 2025, the same thing happened to the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC), after hackers managed to encrypt information in its system and demanded a ransom to decrypt it.
Source: https://boulevardbulgaria.bg/