Taken from the Listín Diario
SANTO DOMINGO - The Government Office of Information and Communication Technologies (OGTIC) and the Cybersecurity Incident Response Team (CSIRT-RD), of the National Cybersecurity Center (CNCS), reported that 14 Dominican State websites were hacked this Sunday by the hacker group called "Hunter Bajwa Pakistan Zindabad".
The information was released through a press release without specifying which websites were affected.
The OGTIC stated that out of a total of 46 government websites that share the same hosting infrastructure, only that number were affected by an incident known technically as “Defacement”.
This web structure deconfiguration attack is "the least serious, consisting of exploiting unidentified vulnerabilities in content management systems to change the appearance of a given web portal with the purpose of attracting attention from the perpetrator.".
According to the Government, the incident was mitigated by the information security department team of the Government Office of Information and Communication Technology in coordination with the National Cyber Incident Response Team (CSIRT-RD) of the National Cybersecurity Center.
They reported that these types of attacks are superficial, and their risk is generally low from an operational perspective since, by design, the affected institutional portals developed and managed only offer information to citizens and the general population and are isolated from the information systems, platforms and applications critical to the functioning of public institutions.
“This is in accordance with the technical standards and regulations promoted by OGTIC, in accordance with good practices and methodologies for the design, development and administration of digital services and applications, and therefore it did not generate damage or loss of data and critical information for the proper performance of the institutional work,” they indicated.
They assured that the technical teams of the institutions involved activated the plan and the cyber incident response and recovery and business continuity protocols to restore the operation of the web portals in the shortest possible time, "which was achieved in record time.".
They also reported that, after restoring service availability, both response teams established new controls to prevent future incidents of this type, "safeguarding the availability, confidentiality and integrity of the data and information hosted at the State Datacenter facilities.".
According to the information provided, this attack did not affect any critical services, government transactional services, or the operations of institutional services.
