Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database(news.risky.biz)
687 points by speckx 1 day ago | 387 comments
tl;dr: A hacker breached Romania's National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising (ANCPI) using valid credentials, then wiped the country's land registry database and backups after a failed extortion attempt, halting real-estate transactions for a week. The attacker, identified as ByteToBreach (allegedly Algerian national Zakaria Mahdjoub), also leaked stolen employee credentials and internal documents on a hacking forum. ANCPI is rebuilding its network from scratch and appears to have offline backups, joining Poland, Slovakia, Greece, and others whose land registries have been hit in recent years.
HN Discussion:
  • Relief that offline backups likely prevented catastrophic loss of land ownership records
  • Corruption in government IT contracts is the root cause of poor security
  • Similar incidents have occurred in other countries, highlighting a broader pattern
  • Poor security practices like weak passwords and networked backups enabled the breach
  • Historical distributed/paper-based land registry systems offered resilience advantages