Montenegro Readies for Cyber Attacks in Presidential Elections

A polling station in Montenegrin capital Podgorica on the parliamentary elections on August 2020.Photo: BIRN/Samir Kajosevic

CIRT is a unit within the Ministry of Public Administration engaged in the handling of information security incidents within the IP address space.

CIRT said it will prevent potential Distributed Denial of Service, DdoS, attacks during the presidential elections in coordination with state institutions, the private sector and international partners.

"There is a noticeable growth trend of DDoS attacks in the course of important political events in our region, but also on a global level. So it's necessary to additionally increase the level of service protection in state institutions, media houses, as well as in organizations that deal with monitoring election processes," CIRT said.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic to a web property and involves multiple connected online devices used to overwhelm a target website with fake traffic. "Those attacks aim to prevent access to the web portal or monitoring election results. They are a frequently used tool by those who do not want certain content to reach the general public," CIRT added.

Last August, government servers were hit by ransomware, a type of malware attack in which the attacker locks and encrypts the target's data and important files and demands payment to unlock and decrypt the data.

After the second cyber-attack, on August 26, certain services were switched off temporarily for security reasons, causing problems in the functioning of the public administration. On August 31, the Ministry of Public Administration urged public companies that supply electricity and water services, ports, airports, as well as telecommunication...