About 10,000 public sector employees in Norway's eastern Hedmark county have been hit by a hacking attack. Civil servants woke up on Wednesday to find their email accounts unavailable due to a hack. County officials said the attack on email systems used by seven separate municipalities came from "foreign attackers.".
The alleged fraudsters, who were detected on Tuesday evening, were “trying to gain access to users ,” Hedmark IKT said in a press release late Tuesday. Hedmark IKT provides the technology systems to the municipalities of Hamar, Stange, Kongsvinger, Sør-Odal, Løten, Nord-Odal and Grue.
The attack on Hedmark IKT's email servers resulted in malicious attachments being sent to other employees' email accounts. The emails appeared to come from a colleague , making it difficult for employees to notice that the email was fake, the press release states.
Hedmark IKT said that when the attack was discovered, it had to stop all incoming emails “for all users.” Staff then tried to assess the extent of the attack and the methods used, in order to be able to stop further attacks and control the damage that had been caused up to that point.
Public servants were sent SMS, warning them not to open attachments that may be sent to them in an email.
The attack on public sector workers in Hedmark came just hours after the Norwegian Parliament announced that its own systems had been attacked last week . It was unclear whether they were related, but both attacks were described as “extremely serious.”
“The attack came from abroad,” Edvard Lysne from Hedmark IKT told Norwegian television. He described the attackers as “bad actors” who want to compromise systems . Several employees had already opened the attachments that could put the entire company, but Hedmark IKT does not yet know how many of those individuals were involved.
