Latvia has a high level of cyber threat, but it is not as high as it was in 2022, said Baiba Kaskina, head of the information technology (IT) security incident prevention institution Cert.lv, in an interview with LETA.
She stressed that in 2022 the level of cyber threats was many times higher than previously seen.
“At the moment, the threat level has not decreased in all areas, but we have learned to cope with it much better, a large part of attacks are repelled by automation, so the load on us and other institutions is now less, but we continue to work intensively,” Kaskina said in the interview.
She also pointed out that Latvia has demonstrated strong cyber resilience and that the attacks recorded so far have not had a significant or lasting impact on society.
Speaking about the most critical periods in Latvian cyberspace so far, Kaskina said that the first half of 2022 and the year as a whole was one of the most critical periods.
In the statistics compiled by Cert-EU on countries that have been targeted by pro-Russian regime hacktivists, Latvia ranked second behind Poland in absolute terms, regardless of the size of the country or the amount of internet resources.
“This is also one of the proofs that the challenges in 2022 were very serious,” Kaskina stressed.
However, Latvia is no longer at the top of the list, as hacktivist attacks are more evenly targeted against all NATO and European Union member states, and no longer explicitly against Poland and the Baltic States. The nature of the threat is now very similar in all three Baltic countries.
“As we all actively support Ukraine in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, there is a sufficiently high proportion of attacks from pro-Russian hacktivist groups,” said Kaskina.
Similarly, the amount of cyber-attacks is influenced by countries’ differing legislation, political events and agendas.
“For example, for us, it is possible to file returns to the State Revenue Service from March 1, and that is when there were a lot of phishing cases specifically pretending to be the State Revenue Service,” Kaskina explained.
Also, in the context of political events, attacks can be different and targeted only at one of the Baltic States, for example, if a country announces special support for Ukraine or condemns some actions by Russia, Belarus, then larger attacks on a specific country or a specific sector can also follow.
“But there are also cases when Latvia and Lithuania are mistaken for one another, for example, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky visited Riga, but the attacks were directed against Lithuania,” Kaskina said.
Cert.lv is a structural unit of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Latvia, whose tasks are to maintain a unified picture of activities taking place in the electronic information space, to provide support in preventing information technology security incidents or to coordinate their prevention in the IP address areas of Latvia and in the “.lv” domain name zone.
Source: BNS
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