The Belgian armed forces have been experiencing series problems following a cyber attack last Thursday. On Monday part of the defence department’s computer network could not be used. The email system had been down for several days. The cyberattack followed a software security leak that was only discovered last week. The Belgian defence department is in the dark as to the identity of its attackers.
It was on Sunday night that the defence department came clean and admitted the serious attack that had been paralysing part of the ministry’s activities for days.
The department said it had discovered the attack on its computer network that is connected to the internet last Thursday. Quarantine measures were immediately taken in order to isolate parts of the network. A defence spokesman said the priority remained to keep the network operational.
Olivier Séverin: “Our teams were mobilised all weekend in order to keep the issue under control, continue our operations and inform partners. We are continuing to monitor the situation”.
The attack is the result of a hole in the security of Apache’s Log4j, a commonly used software. “The security leak started ahead of the weekend and formed a significant risk to business networks worldwide” the defence department says, “as many much-used apps employ this software to register logs”.
A warning about this problem was issued last week. It remains unclear how the defence department could be impacted by the leak says VRT defence expert Jens Franssen. The defence department isn’t providing any further comment just yet.
Check Point Software Technologies, an Israeli supplier of cybersecurity solutions, says a group of hackers linked to the Iranian regime calling itself Charming Kitten of APT 35 used the error in Log4j to carry out attacks on seven Israeli targets including government websites.
Log4j allows tech companies to monitor if their apps are working properly. Producers are alerted to programme errors via Log4j and allows producers to seek a solution. Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Tesla, Minecraft and Twitter all use Log4j.