Cyber-attacks have become commonplace says gov't official

Cyber-attacks on Poland have now become “commonplace”, a senior Polish security official said on Thursday.

Stanisław Żaryn, the government commissioner for information security, was speaking to reporters two days after an attack on a government website, which was attributed to the Russian security services, and which forced it to shut down.

Żaryn said that a pro-Russian hacker group called NoName was probably behind the attack on the tax portal.

"We had, in fact, a problem caused by the attack on the tax.gov.pl portal," he said.

But he added it was a "simple" attack by hacking standards.

According to Żaryn, users' access to the site had not been blocked and "there had been no leak of taxpayers' data, either".

This kind of activity, he continued, was now "commonplace" and that hackers tended to target various public and government sites as well as private institutions.

"It is a war in cyberspace which we have been dealing with now," he stated, adding that this was also a war against the Polish government and private institutions.

Referring to the NoName group, Żaryn said it had recently been very active.

"The group is very popular, its attacks are very simple but troublesome," he said. "It usually carries out DDoS attacks which are unable to destroy neither systems nor data."