Norway ‘s Parliament, Stortinget, discloses a security breach

Hackers breached Norway ‘s Parliament, Stortinget, and accessed to email for a small number of parliamentary representatives and employees.

Norway’s parliament announced Tuesday that it was the target of a major cyber-attack that allowed hackers to access emails and data of a small number of parliamentary representatives and employees.

“The parliament has recently been targetted in a vast cyber attack,” reads a statement from Norway’s parliament. “There have been intrusions in the email accounts of a few MPs and employees. Our analyses show that varying quantities of data have been downloaded,”

Stortinget director Marianne Andreassen confirmed that an investigation into the incident is ongoing, for this reason, he did not provide any detail on the possible origin of the attackers.

Norway’s intelligence agency confirmed the investigation in a tweet:

The administrative director revealed that the IT staff at the parliament had detected anomalies a little more than a week ago and immediately adopted the necessary measure in response to the attack.

“We don’t know who’s behind it,” Marianne Andreassen told reporters.

According to the local press, the parliament’s IT staff has shut down its email service to prevent hackers from exfiltrating sensitive data.

The Stortinget has already started notifying impacted representatives and employees about the security breach.

The website of the Storting was working normally on Tuesday.

Cyber attacks against infrastructures and entities in Norway are not so common.

In May 2020, Norway’s state investment fund, Norfund, suffered a business email compromise (BEC) attack, hackers stole $10 million.

On January 8, 2019 the Health South East RHF, that is the healthcare organization that manages hospitals in Norway’s southeast region (countries of Østfold, Akershus, Oslo, Hedmark, Oppland, Buskerud, Vestfold, Telemark, Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder), disclosed a security breach that may have exposed sensitive data belonging to more than half of the population.

The incident was announced by the national healthcare security centre HelseCERT that detected an abnormal activity against computer systems in the region. HelseCERT notified the incident to local authorities as well as NorCERT.

In February 2017, the Norwegian intelligence agency PST confirmed that the country’s authorities were one of the targets of spear phishing attacks launched by the Russian APT 29 group.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Norway)