Cyprus Mail 12 April 2023 - by Iole Damaskinos
Eighty per cent of the state’s services have been restored, Government Spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said on Wednesday, following the leak on Monday afternoon in the basement of the Ministry of Finance that caused them to be taken offline.
Speaking on state broadcaster CyBC’s morning programme, Letymbiotis said government webpages are gradually going back up after and it is hoped that remaining 20 per cent of services will be restored in a matter of hours.
A special ministerial council is scheduled on Wednesday to discuss how to ensure such incidents do not happen in future.
Among the topics to be discussed are the relocation of the servers, immediate back-up systems, and whether and what crisis management procedures had been in place to protect state digital services against such accidents, natural disasters and cyberattacks.
The finance ministry’s permanent secretary Giorgos Panteli told the state broadcaster on Monday that technicians had dried the servers and were in the process of examining the extent of the damage.
The deputy ministry said it had ordered an investigation into why the government server hub had not been earlier relocated from the finance ministry to the premises of the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority, per a November 2022 decision by the cabinet, under the previous administration.
“Unfortunately, the systems had been placed inside the building of the finance ministry, in a way that left them exposed to a possible accident,” Panteli said.
The probe will also look into why no additional protective measures were taken in the meantime at the hub’s current premises.
Letymbiotis assured the public that there was no data loss from the incident.
