Polish space agency says it was hit by a cyberattack

• POLSA announces it suffered a data breach
• Agency says it shut down its IT systems following alert
• Insiders claim incident was due to email compromise

The Polish Space Agency (POLSA) has confirmed it recently suffered a cyberattack which forced it to pull IT infrastructure offline.

The agency confirmed the attack via an X post, in which it said that relevant authorities have already been notified.

“There has been a cybersecurity incident at POLSA,” the machine-translated X post reads. “The relevant services and institutions have been informed. The situation is being analyzed. In order to secure data after the hack, the POLSA network was immediately disconnected from the Internet. We will keep you updated.”

Russia stands accused

Such a short announcement left plenty of room for speculation, and surely enough, some media started discussing if this was a ransomware attack. After all, it is standard practice in ransomware attacks to disconnect affected infrastructure from the internet, to prevent data leaks and quickly sever connections to any persistence mechanisms.

However, an anonymous source told The Register that POLSA’s emails were compromised, and that the staff was told to use phones for communication, instead of emails.

The news was later confirmed by Poland's digitalization minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, who said the Polish government was engaged in "intensive operational activities" to understand who the attackers are. Gawkowski added that POLSA was getting a helping hand from the country’s two computer security incident response teams, CSIRT NASK and CSIRT MON.

The identity of the threat actors, or the goal of the attack, is not known at this time. Reuters reports Warsaw has “repeatedly” accused Moscow of attempting to destabilize Poland because of the military support it is providing to Ukraine, with whom Russia is at war right now.

Russia has denied all allegations, Reuters added.

POLSA supported Poland’s involvement in European Space Agency (ESA) projects, including participation in the ExoMars mission and the development of satellite technologies. POLSA also played a role in launching Poland’s first scientific satellites, such as PW-Sat and BRITE-PL, which focused on space debris mitigation and stellar research.

Via The Register

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