Cyprus Mail 12 April 2023 - by Iola Damaskinos
Τhe damage following the leak at the basement where government servers are located has been repaired and all systems are up and running, the ministry of finance said on Wednesday.
In a press release, the ministry specified the government’s information systems, email and websites were back up, thanks to the efforts of the IT department.
Online services of the various government departments are now operational and the public can be served, it concluded.
Earlier in the morning, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said 80 per cent of the state’s services had been restored, 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 were gradually going back up after and he hoped that remaining 20 per cent of services will be restored in a matter of hours.
A special ministerial council was scheduled on Wednesday to discuss how to ensure such incidents do not happen in future.
Among the topics discussed were 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.
