Municipalities can leak sensitive data - Swedish Dagbladet

Criminal groups have planted malicious software on hundreds of computers in the country’s municipalities and universities, according to statistics from the National Agency for social protection and preparedness, MSB, which continuously monitors the Internet traffic. From October 31 to November 27 was identified infection in 379 municipal computers and 269 computers belonging to universities and colleges.

The malware spreads by users downloading infected files or visit infected websites, and in turn acts as electronic backdoors that the criminal actors can use to access computers’ contents or remotely control them.

The ultimate consequence is that people wrongfully can access data from the social, cheat their way to higher scores on the University by ensuring the exams in advance, and stealing research data stored on computers.

problem is that the malicious code is becoming more and more sophisticated.

Jonas Thambert, IT Security Advisor at MSB.

- Will the wrong computers infected, it can obviously cause problems, such as sensitive information leaking out. Meanwhile, we have not the whole picture for us, but we see only a part of the computers that are infected. The problem is that the malicious code is becoming more and more sophisticated. Often it is about criminal networks eastward, in the former Soviet republics and China, says Jonas Thambert, IT Security Advisor at MSB.

Anders Söderström, CEO of security company Sentor, experiencing in touch with the customers to the private sector has a much higher awareness of cyber security issues than the public. According to Anders Söderström, municipalities, counties and colleges usually not as clear guidelines on how to protect sensitive information.

– It’s set tough demands on security of private companies that handle credit card data, the same requirement should be imposed on the public sector which processes personal data, he says.

Niklas Svensson, Head of IT Infrastructure in Kalmar Municipality, which received 226 rashes from October 22 to November 22, explains the high number of each computer gets its own address on the Internet, to Unlike other municipalities in which a large number of computers can hide behind a single address and thus provide fewer rashes.

– It is clear that there are few, it is, but we manage overall 5500 computers. In this perspective, it is still too many, but I do not think it’s disastrous many, he says.

Chalmers University of Technology, which is located at the top among higher education institutions, with 56 tee during the same period, will now investigate the issue.

– Would there be Trojans on computers that Chalmers takes it seriously, and we can not of course exclude. What we usually do in this situation is to check which computers it is, barring them from our network and inform users, says Tony Ottosson Gadd, IT manager at Chalmers.