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Ukraine’s Minister of Justice says registers are “ready to work again” as criminal investigations into December hack proceed.
Ukraine has announced the full restoration of its unified and state registers after a devastating Russian cyber attack took the systems offline in December 2024.
“The Russians did not achieve their goal. Step by step, we restored the key registers for notaries, then the DRACS, the Unified State Register, and now the work on restoring the last part of the registers has been completed,” Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s Minister of Justice and Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine said in a 20 January post to Facebook.
“The final step is to update the data entered during the restoration, which is already being done by specialists from the enforcement service and private specialists. I emphasise once again that the data of Ukrainians was not lost.”
The initial attack took place on 19 December 2024 and led to the registers’ work being suspended. Volodymyr Karastelyov, acting head of Ukraine’s SSU Cyber Security Department, attributed the attack to a group linked to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, otherwise known as the GRU.
“Overall, we are working in three areas: repelling the attack, restoring the infrastructure and documenting this war crime,” Karastelyov said at the time.
“The main line of enquiry is that Russian intelligence services, in particular a GRU hacker group, is behind this cyber attack.”
Stefanishyna said that Ukraine learnt “important lessons” from the incident and was implementing several changes to defend against further attacks.
“The first is responsibility. We have terminated cooperation with the head of the State Enterprise National Information Systems. The criminal proceedings, which were opened immediately after the attack, are still ongoing. The first audit of the National Information Systems was conducted, and it has already been completed. In addition, an internal investigation is underway,” Stefanishyna said.
The second step was to pass a law creating a professional network of cyber security specialists within all state entities. The third step, however, is to work on international cooperation.
“Cyber threats know no borders, so we actively involve the experience and expertise of partner countries,” Stefanishyna said.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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