Hackers Breached Norwegian Parliament Emails To Steal Data

Hackers Breached Norwegian Parliament Emails To Steal Data

Image: Magnus Fröderberg/norden.org

Attackers have compromised a limited number of email accounts of Norwegian Parliament (Storting) representatives and employees according to Storting’s managing director Marianne Andreassen.

After gaining access to the email inboxes, the hackers stole unspecified amounts of data from each of the hacked email accounts according to a statement published on the parliament’s site earlier today.

At the moment, the investigators haven’t yet discovered what kind of data was exfiltrated by the attackers from the compromised Storting email accounts.

The Parliament is closely working with relevant security authorities to investigate the attack and Andreassen said that the incident was reported by Storting’s administration to the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST).

“PST is aware of the IT attack on the Storting,” a tweet from PST’s official Twitter account reads. “Once PST has received the report, we will assess whether there is a basis for starting an investigation.”

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Labor Party and Center Party employees, politicians affected

Andreassen also said that the extent of the damage behind the attack is not currently known and no comment will be provided on the motive or cause of the attack until the ongoing investigation is completed as reported by the Norwegian public broadcasting company NRK.

The Norwegian Labor Party’s communications manager Jarle Roheim Håkonsen confirmed to the NRK that both Labor Party employees and politicians have been affected in the attack.

The Center Party also confirmed that its representatives and employees were impacted during the Storting security breach.

The parliament is currently being assisted during the attack’s investigation by the Norwegian National Security Authority (NSM), a government cybersecurity agency responsible for coordinating the country’s national computer emergency response team (NorCERT).

NSM “has contributed with incident response, analysis, and other measures during the cyber incident against the Norwegian parliament,’ said NSM spokesman Trond Øvstedal, as first reported by CyberScoop.

NSM will also provide the Norwegian Parliament with technical support during the investigation.

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