Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

https://news.risky.biz/risky-bulletin-hacker-wipes-romanias-entire-land-registry-database/

by speckx • 2 days ago

705 353 2 days ago

news.risky.biz

Squarex• 2 days ago

The same thing happened to Slovakia not that long ago.

boringg• 2 days ago

how did they solve it?

jankubica• 2 days ago

it took months to go back fully online. they also had usable backups (so they used those for the data), but the infrastructure had so many vulnerabilities that they had to fix it first, hence the delay

andrewshadura• 2 days ago

Restored from very old backups and paper documents.

martin_ky• 2 days ago

The Slovak land register was hacked in January 2025. Hackers uknown encrypted the database, asking for an undisclosed 7-figure amount as ransom.

The whole country's real estate market was paralyzed for about a month. It took couple of months to restore everything from backups and paper agenda and resume normal operation of the land register office.

It was the largest cyber attack in Slovakia's history. The authorities to this day haven't provided any information on who might be behind it. The investigation is still ongoing. Several government figures including the PM were however very eager to immediately point on Ukraine, without any sort of proof.

aa_is_op• 2 days ago

If I remember correctly, this is the hack that Fico tried to blame on Ukraine, even if the hackers were a known Russian ransomware crew that literally posted in their Telegrams about their support for Russia... right?

dredmorbius7• 2 days ago

Accounts at the time:

"1T+ in assets are frozen as Slovakia's Land Registry faces ransomware attack" <https://spectator.sme.sk/politics-and-society/c/news-digest-...> (9 Jan 2025) HN discussion (1 comment): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42650343>

"Ransomware Attack Paralyzes Slovakian Land Registry, Souring Slovakia-Ukraine Relations" <https://dailysecurityreview.com/security-spotlight/slovakian...> (January 14, 2025)

"Slovakia Hit by Historic Cyber-Attack on Land Registry " <https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/slovakia-hit-by-l...> (10 January 2025)

Apparently tied to Ukraine in this case.

GJim• 2 days ago

Apparently tied to Ukraine in this case.

Lord no! That accusation doesn't pass the sniff test.

Try looking further east for the real culprits.

skinfaxi• 2 days ago

Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania.

So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.

chasd00• 2 days ago

now they get to do a greenfield implementation too!

/joking, i'm sure this is not a happy time for whoever is trying to rebuild everything

nicman23• 2 days ago

i think it is a very happy time charging whatever per hour you want

ddoolin• 2 days ago

I wonder why the say "appears to have had," is that an assumption or was it stated somewhere? Without an offline backup, it would indeed be a very serious problem, more than it already is.

n4r9• 2 days ago

My reading is: "The agency would surely be panicking more than this if they didn't have an offline backup".

embedding-shape• 2 days ago

I think the "offline" part is what is that "appears" to be, clearly they have backups somewhere, but maybe the attacker just missed to wipe some other "online" location.

sixothree• 2 days ago

I interpreted this as a vagueness related to the reporting accuracy, not the existence of a backup.

nicce2• 2 days ago

One more reason to to define the whole infrastructure in code and have offline backups. Recovering could be measured in hours.

vkou• 2 days ago

Only if you routinely test it, and if that kind of access to the offline backup is low friction enough to be doing that monthly, it might not be enough of a redundancy.

baq• 2 days ago

has entire infra in code
spinning up a new shard takes a quarter

Both can be true

ninalanyon• 2 days ago

A backup that isn't offline is not really a backup as it far too easy to destroy it even by accident/carelessness/lack of understanding.

When I was responsible for backups we kept the tape cartridges in a fire safe in a different building. We took a full backup weekly and moved the tape from the robot to the firesafe as soon as the backup was complete. Only the daily incremental backups stayed in the robot for more than a day.

krisoft• 2 days ago

That sounds good, but wouldn’t you worry that the same hackers will let themselves in via the same route again?

You would need to understand first how they gained access and verify that they can’t do the same again. That in itself could take days if not weeks. Then of course they might have found new vulnerabilities while they were in, so you would need to worry about that too.

close04• 2 days ago

Recovering could be measured in hours.

Yes, even hundreds of them sometimes.

The most time consuming part of recovering from an attack is validating everything. It takes more than a few hours to validate the infra that stays put isn’t compromised, the IaC code itself isn’t compromised, deploy the infra, bring a copy of the offline backup of your data (your IaC can’t drive to another site and bring the backups, then make a copy, unless tou are really sure you removed any trace of compromise), validate that the backup is sound, then restore it.

In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.

gchamonlive6• 2 days ago

I'd bet money the offline copy is far from up-to-date, given the state of the network. It still has potential to be mayhem

_heimdall• 2 days ago

If its at least somewhat recent hopefully those affected still have paperwork for any property ownership transfers. Finding proof of property you bought decades ago would be a huge pain.

anvuong2• 2 days ago

It depends. In my country the online land register data is just a copy of the physical land owning certificate. The physical certificates (1 for the owner, 1 for the local government, and at least 1 more for some document keeping agency) are the source of truth.

ragall4• 2 days ago

Quite likely the opposite: a few weeks ago a ransomware attack halted ~100 hospitals' management systems in Romania, and the cybercrime defense unit just disconnected all hospitals and had the local admins rebuild from backups and paper trails. So I'm quite sure that all public administration IT admins have been running drills and probably have up-to-date backups.

21asdffdsa126• 2 days ago

Remember the xerox-scandal years back, that invalidated officially scanned documents. You already life in a world where "scanned before" means you can legally challenge the validity of a document.

unreal6• 2 days ago

Is this the scandal to which you are referring?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202

mindslight3• 2 days ago

I am pretty sure I was bitten by this bug, or a similar bug, on an IRA transfer form that I uploaded to a bank. On the scan that I uploaded, one digit in the account number was a clean "5", but the customer service person said it looked like a good clean "6". I presume their document management system was an outcropping of a system originally set up for dealing with faxes, and used that or a similar compression algorithm.

ryukoposting• 2 days ago

Hah, scan-dal.

nashashmi• 2 days ago

Has not digital data always been a secondary source of information, instead of a primary source of information? Paper records cannot be thrown away. And new records are probably recorded digital only but a copy is sent to the parties in the transaction

Kinrany• 2 days ago

Paper records burn great and are harder to store in multiple locations

fy20• 2 days ago

At least in my EU country, no the digital record is the primary.

When you buy property you get a deed for the land, but the details of a property can change after that. The deed also doesn't contain ownership, it just says what is on the land. It's common for land to have multiple owners (1/32 is not unheard of) due to inheritance.

I'm building a house, the land deed just has the land plot as we bought it, until the house is 100% finished (and registered) we will not get an updated deed, although the digital system has newer data (you need to register the construction progress).

justsomehnguy2• 2 days ago

Any country big enough was moving digital first/digital only for years. And with a paper records there is always a question if this one is the last one and contains a valid data or it's from years ago and since then everything was changed multiple times.

Just recently I've seen a 30 y.o. deed on some commercial property. Despite it was valid and predated the digital era, it had almost nothing common with the things on the ground.

nly• 2 days ago

In the UK deeds no longer really exist and do not take precedence over the land registry.

Property that isn't registered can remain unregistered but must be registered before it is sold.

b1125• 2 days ago

The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change.

It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.

Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.

So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.

marginalx• 2 days ago

Everything comes with a risk, and people usually take it with a decent understanding of how to mitigate it mostly.

If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.

sib• 2 days ago

There are many examples of important paper records (property, birth/death, etc) being lost in fires or floods, so it's not the case that "everything worked perfectly fine" in those days either.

wwweston• 2 days ago

Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.

The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.

My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.

dghlsakjg6• 2 days ago

I agree that digitalization is not a panacea, but things did not work anywhere close to perfectly fine when everything was on paper. There are just as many ways for analog/physical processes to go wrong.

A sophisticated genius hacker in a different country can’t touch your paper records, but an absolute moron with a bic lighter can destroy records just as effectively. Hell, an irresponsible clerk can do an incredible amount of damage just by misfiling things.

Duplication literally doubles costs in the physical world, and has the downside of being very hard to keep in sync. A bank keeping paper ledgers would be absolutely fucked if they had to switch to a backup ledger that was more than a few hours old.

On net, I believe that digitalized documents are a net improvement.

franciscop2• 2 days ago

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like that, but everyone knows who their neighbor is, at least in a town that is small like this.

So they rebuilt it first from first hand proof, then by testimonies, with a period of counter claims available IIRC. For sure there were some false claims, but given the magnitude of the disaster, this is the best solution within that context.

bombcar2• 2 days ago

This is where "possession is 9/10ths of the law" comes from.

kefabean• 2 days ago

I always wonder how things would be reconciled if something similar happened to a bank. What would be the simplest way to ‘download’ one’s balance whilst proving that the downloaded files were signed by the bank?

timcobb• 2 days ago

And this is why we need title insurance :(

SteveGerencser2• 2 days ago

Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.

danielam• 2 days ago

There is little alternative.

A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.

alexpotato2• 2 days ago

Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people

In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc

Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this:

- get multiple people to sign sworn affidavits that you are who you say you are

- that begins the "paper trail" of evidence that allows you to start getting the rest of the document chain

- you rebuild from there.

If you're married, there is already a similar process for when a spouse takes the last name of the other spouse. The marriage certificate is the first step and then it goes from there for driver's license, passport, credit cards and so on.

SoftTalker3• 2 days ago

There are also physical markers in the ground at the corners of most properties. So if you had to, you could send a surveyor out to recertify boundaries. That would get very expensive quickly, however.

londons_explore• 2 days ago

Wouldn't work in a city like NYC where nobody knows their neighbours and a chunk of houses are empty and only owned by shady shell companies as investments...

markdown5• 2 days ago

In my country, titles are always issued in duplicate. The land registry gets one of these originals, and the landowner the other. Just about every landowner has their original on their person, or held by a bank if it's mortgaged.

So all is not lost if the registry goes up in flames.

pseudohadamard2• 2 days ago

Happened here about 30 years ago with a fire in a council planning office. All building plans and records were lost. It was enormously useful because there was no way to prove that that house addition there wasn't approved or in any plans. Fans of Yes Minister will know the appropriate quote from Sir Humphrey.

fakedang• 1 day ago

Definitely only works in high trust societies. Heck, even in normal times in India there's a rampant land mafia of which many politicians are a part. Forged provenance, illegal squatting and forced seizure, extraction and evictions are the norm.

ExoticPearTree3• 2 days ago

I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.

You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.

anvuong2• 2 days ago

Happens far more often than you would think in developing countries.

notahacker• 2 days ago

Squatters, boundary disputes and rent defaults happen all the time.

Plus having most of your net worth locked up in something no sane person would consider buying off you because you can't prove you own it is ... suboptimal

dsego2• 2 days ago

People can come and cut down trees, use the land for their cattle, raise crops or just start building something. If you don't challenge it and they get away with it for a while, they could even gain use of the land legally.

iso16314• 2 days ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg15ev0347o

ragall4• 2 days ago

After the tsunami that hit Thailand and wiped out many fishing villages on the Pacific coast, the people were evacuated but as soon as they returned, they found the local mafia occupying the land, and as they had no need and there was no land registry, they were forced to rebuy their land.

dist-epoch• 2 days ago

Romania is not very digitalized, and it still has a lot of paper bureaucracy.

Even if the digital records were completely lost, they still have the paper ones.

being unable to prove land ownership

People know who owns what, there are also paper contracts of ownership which are more authoritative than the digital records.

cynicalreason• 2 days ago

Reconstructing that archive from the records would be close to impossible. The documents they issue and banks/notaries and others have have 30 day expires. In theory most of these documents are issued on sale / mortgages / loans against these type of assets. Both notaries and banks have their own record system - I don't think there's a common system they all use, for notaries I'm not sure if they keep electronic records of these papers .. the system that was hacked was supposed to be it.

sph2• 2 days ago

the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months

The last thing any government will want to deal with is massive irretrievable data loss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FrQnQv0Vw

theredleft• 2 days ago

the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership

accidental communism

kazinator• 2 days ago

I'm skeptical that they not missing at least a week's or so worth of land title registry transactions, if the only thing they have left is offline, because offline backups are not made after every single transaction.

If the hacker was targeting the erasure of a particular recent transaction, they may well have succeeded. And by deleting numerous others, they have plausible deniability in the subsequent dispute over the property. If you just wipe a record that is related to you, and the manipulation is discovered (which it will be, one way or another), you are part of a narrow circle of suspects.

matkoniecz• 2 days ago

In such case notaries (or whoever reports transaction) can resubmit them.

Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?

basilikum3• 2 days ago

offline backups are not made after every single transaction.

All you need is an append only tape or even a printer.

Interestingly in the Bangladesh Central Bank hack they used a printer to print out any transactions, but the intruders disabled it or it was just malfunctioning because it's a printer.

But I doubt the Romanians actually had such a system.

hinkley7• 2 days ago

When I worked at a stressful place I was worried not only of our version control getting damaged but also someone deciding they had had enough and doing damage on their way out.

I had a copy of our code on media in my desk labeled “promotion” and updated it every month. In retrospect someone going through my desk would have assumed blackmail material and been disappointed to find only code.

gowld• 2 days ago

In the US, real estate purchases come with "title insurance", because there is no official, guaranteed, land registry database.

bluGill2• 2 days ago

That depends on the state, some do have a registry.

markdown5• 2 days ago

wtf

markdown5• 2 days ago

A land title is written on paper or cardboard, with signatures and stamps on it.

The digital copy is just that; a digital copy.

The hacker would have to destroy the database and all backups, and also burn down the building holding the registry.

ragall4• 2 days ago

That's not how things work in most countries in Europe: the land registry is the authoritative source, and there are no bearer titles any more.

kleton• 2 days ago

About 15% of the UK's land parcels are not in any land registry database, because recording there only became compulsory in 1990, so if an event like a sale/morgtage didn't happen to a property since then, it might not be registered. Regardless of the land registry, the ownership can still easily be proven.

itake• 1 day ago

I was just in Hungary and they attempted to return land seized by the communist government by basically asking around.

People would get their buddy to agree the land was theirs so not a perfect system, but some families were made more whole.

ksec• 1 day ago

I wonder what media they used for their offline copy.

hughw2• 2 days ago

Was hoping it was a political act in favor of land reform or against owning property.

subsaharancoder• 2 days ago

"you will own nothing and be happy"..no thank you!

jplrssn2• 2 days ago

I always thought the “you will own nothing” expression referred to a Gini coefficient of 1, not 0.

The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.

wateralien• 2 days ago

Fair enough. But you do realize that all ownership is a made-up shared fiction that most people believe as real.

redleader55• 2 days ago

We had that almost 80 years ago for a few decades, but we shot a guy at the end of it. I hope the next one to suggest something like this remembers the history and refrains from it.

It did help the West, and especially the UK, to get as immigrants very high good plumbers and handy men. The rest of us went into STEM and are now working for FAANGS.

victorbjorklund• 2 days ago

Romania already tried communism. The people did not love it.

arisAlexis• 2 days ago

We will see a lot of those with open source Mythos equivalent models.

gregoriol• 2 days ago

The new world will be: move fast and trust AIs

LelouBil2• 2 days ago

I mean:

Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials

This is social engineering or corruption.

rcostin2k2• 2 days ago

... and an incorrect password policy and poor access control. Usually, in these institutions, if STS is not responsible, there are third-party companies, usually proxies, that are responsible for managing the firewall and accessing the data. The lack of procedures and lack of supervision from the authority, combined with the delay from the service providers, leads to a situation where everyone does backups as they think is best. That's why it takes so long now, because STS restores data from different formats, from different places, made at different times

sph2• 2 days ago

“This is good for AI”

RandomLensman9• 2 days ago

What's wrong with an old fashioned paper registry then?

dizhn• 2 days ago

I am pretty sure they have that too.

RandomLensman9• 2 days ago

So which one is the ground truth if there is a difference between them?

drdrey• 2 days ago

fires? floods? documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed?

RandomLensman9• 2 days ago

Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.

alt2275• 2 days ago

Seems like fires and floods would also affect servers too.

cbg02• 2 days ago

Nothing, this is why they have both.

b3lvedere• 2 days ago

Rotting, sweaty human hands and fire to name a few.

alt2275• 2 days ago

Pretty sure fire is a risk to servers as well.

Tangurena23• 2 days ago

It isn't fast enough for mortgage backed securities. Each transfer of ownership of the mortgage requires a separate transfer fee paid to the registry.

Moving from a paper registry at each county clerk (in the US) was a part of the 2008 financial meltdown.

alexpotato2• 2 days ago

Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption.

Specifically:

- government gives IT/data contracts to cronies

- cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data

- things like this happen

dmos62• 2 days ago

Same thing is rampant in other Eastern European countries as well. Tips on how to address this for those of us that are publicly minded?

inigyou4• 2 days ago

I'd say form an IT firm and bid on government contracts and do honest work, but we all know how that goes in reality. Honest workers don't get the contracts. You can still try, though.

appplication• 2 days ago

There is a somewhat valid argument to be made that aggressively trying to hack these insecure government portals could lead to a real reprioritization towards competence.

drunner• 2 days ago

It's no different anywhere. Security isn't valued since it's just an email and a .01% or less income fine.

The amount of times my SSN and correlated info has been leaked and I've been offered a free year or credit monitoring is depressing.

ItsYan• 2 days ago

Vote and join a party

petre3• 2 days ago

Use EU funds to build it then tip the EPPO when they defraud the funds?

dgellow• 2 days ago

Look at what the new Hungary PM is doing

LelouBil2• 2 days ago

They said this in the article:

Sources told Risky Business that the hacker entered using valid credentials

otabdeveloper4• 2 days ago

"It's corruption and cronies" is a generic cop-out answer that doesn't explain anything.

Like whenever someone gets caught in a compromising situation they say they "were hacked", as if saying that means anything.

ExoticPearTree3• 2 days ago

Its a bit more nuanced than that. The company responsible for ensuring the cybersecurity of the system told the press that "they secured what the client told them to secure and it was not their job to tell the client what needs to be secured".

peder• 2 days ago

And I think it's a label that's used freely on Hacker News against Eastern Europeans

justsomehnguy2• 2 days ago

It's always amusing how this is always attributed to the corruption.

It's even more funny on Reddit when you can see the person who is blaming cronies in his Romania but has posts of him doing some blue-collar work in the Midwest.

pax• 2 days ago

Somebody vibed an explainer dashboard with what surfaced online about the incident https://ancpi-atac.mariuscomper.uk/en/

AdrianB12• 2 days ago

It is not corruption. Or not just corruption.

A close relative, government employee, was in charge of building a new application. They have nobody in that entire organization of several thousands people that know how to write specifications for an IT application, nobody that knows how to design, test and deploy it. This is because some government employees have decent salaries, but in IT the private sector is paying a lot more, so almost anyone remotely competent is going to the private sector. So in this case an organization of non-IT people had to deal with the contract and all the associated problems - there is no need to guess, it did not go well. That kind of project could have been done properly with ~ 10% of the budget in the same timeline.

I have a friend that worked as a developer in such a government IT project. The project cost was ~ 5-10 times what was worth, a chain of sub-contractors did the work, less than ten competent people doing the project, charged by the bid winner for over 100 people and actual staff was around 70 at most, for a short period of time.

Both projects above are in Romania. Lack of competent people in the projects, especially in decision roles, was the main problem.

mhitza• 2 days ago

As a Romanian I can tell you that most of the corruption happens through "dedicated contracts", or outright syphoning.

In this case I expect an underpaid employee, and at most an incompetent nephew of someone. They had no reason to have an .authorized_keys file in the webroot of the website, and yet they did.

If you want to know what "dedicated contracts" look like in practice they are overly specific requirements than can only match a single business. The best example that comes to mind was when one county needed to buy busses (or vans) and the maximum length admitted was bellow the most common options, but as luck would have it a nephew of a cousing of someone with decision power (or something like that) just so happened to be the one importing cars that precisely matched the specs.

akudha• 2 days ago

If it is any consolation, this kind of corruption exists in many countries. I don’t know how to fix this, but corruption always finds creative ways.

Here is one I learned recently - govt started issuing birth certificates online. Hopefully Less corruption, right? Officials made deliberate spelling mistakes in names etc, because you have to go in person for corrections. In person means bribe, which means back to same situation as before (almost)

varispeed• 2 days ago

This is the same in the UK too. Governments everywhere are the same. It's just humans motivated by greed and easily corruptible.

cbg02• 2 days ago

An update from the land registry (the truthfulness of this remains to be seen depending on how fast this comes back online):

ANCPI announced that it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud. The operation is being coordinated by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) and is expected to be completed on Wednesday, July 22.

After the migration, authorized institutions will inspect the applications and data and prepare a report on the condition of the systems and any additional measures required. Based on that report, ANCPI will announce an estimated date for restoring its applications. Services will be brought back online gradually, according to operational priorities.

ANCPI says it is rebuilding its database from backup copies stored in several locations. The agency rejected reports suggesting that it did not have sufficient backups, explaining that the use of multiple storage locations provides redundancy and allows data to be restored after cybersecurity incidents.

According to ANCPI, affected systems must remain isolated until every identified vulnerability has been addressed. Although shutting down the services has caused temporary inconvenience, the agency says the measure was necessary to protect the data and ensure that operations restart safely and reliably.

The restoration of the IT infrastructure is described as a complex process being conducted in cooperation with the relevant authorities. ANCPI has also confirmed that a criminal investigation is underway, but no official conclusions can yet be released.

The agency warned that claims circulating publicly about the alleged consequences of the attack are not based on official information and do not reflect the current state of the investigation.

curiousObject• 2 days ago

it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud

This proclamation, coming from a governmental organization, makes me afraid they are doomed. Effectively they are saying they are fixing the mistake by repeating it.

What they should do is admit fault. Freeze the system. Get independent expert help.

Best wishes, recent Romanian land buyers and sellers

Edit: thank you @cbg0 for giving us this update

phoronixrly• 2 days ago

They are getting expert help. I expect that the agency maintained their own local deployment on infra administered by its own employees. Now they are migrating to the central 'government(-maintained) cloud'.

At the same time they are working with authorities.

Not everything needs an external consultant.

ragall4• 2 days ago

Your prejudice knows no bounds.

hinkley7• 2 days ago

My ex was late from work once a week because the company did commercial real estate logistics (sort of similar domain here) and she had the job of going to the secure data center and grabbing a backup disk out of the cage and transferring it to a safety deposit box.

The dumb thing was the bank was two blocks from the data center and less than eight (six?) from the office so catastrophic events might have hit both or all three. The owner kept a second copy at his house, and that was the only geographically separated copy.

dredmorbius7• 1 day ago

Yes, quite, this.

One of the lessons (and subsequent data integrition / continuity of business practices) learned from the 9/11 attacks in New York City, and destruction of both primary and secondary data stores of multiple entities (as well as several emergency-response agencies at various government levels from city to federal) was that essential data and operational roles need to be redundant across very widely-separated locations.

E.g.: from "Discussion note prepared by staffs of the Federal Reserve, the New York State Banking Department, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, for discussion at a meeting on February 26, 2002 at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York":

[I]t was clear that business continuity planning had not fully taken into account the potential for wide-area disasters and for major loss or inaccessibility of critical staff. Contingency planning at many institutions generally focused on problems with a single building or system. Some firms arranged for their backup facilities to be in nearby buildings on the assumption that, for example, a fire might incapacitate or destroy a single facility. Very few planned for an emergency disrupting an entire business district, city, or region. As a result, some firms lost access to both their primary and backup facilities in the aftermath of the September 11 events, severely disrupting their operations.

"Summary of "Lessons Learned" from Events of September 11 and Implications for Business Continuity" February 13, 2002" <https://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/lessonslearned.htm>

Geographic distances were rarely considered prior to 9/11. Most companies were comfortable replicating data intercampus or to a facility within a few miles of a primary data center. A few firms, such as Nasdaq, actually replicated data out of state.

"9/11: Top lessons learned for disaster recovery" (Sep 9, 2011) <https://www.computerworld.com/article/1545389/9-11-top-lesso...>

Also: "Hard-Earned Disaster Recovery Lessons From 9/11 and other disasters" (2025) <https://backupcentral.com/hard-earned-disaster-recovery-less...>

Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, widespread power and other failures, etc., can all have impacts across many kilometres, possibly many hundreds. Redundancy equates to survivability here.

More broadly, information and data services are fundamentally about risk management and disaster response, as realised during 9/11 (as well as multiple earlier and subsequent incidents) in ways which weren't fully realised at the turn of the millennium. Or even today in some organisations.

Make backups. Test backups. Practice switchovers between primary and secondary (or multiple redundant) operations. And keep those resources and facilities widely separated.

21asdffdsa126• 2 days ago

Imagine if the hacker was more clever and started writing plausible nonsense into the database, corrupting the backups.

jopsen• 2 days ago

Selling properties you don't own, ideally land owned by government..

PunchTornado• 2 days ago

ideally properties of corrupt politicians

pelagicAustral• 2 days ago

This is Government, "plausible nonsense" is already being inserted into every single table on a daily basis.

21asdffdsa126• 2 days ago

You know- that this sentiment, this "decomplexify" society at all cost, because the monetary burden of taxes steals my lifeblood has produced several catastrophes in the past?

Pol Pots Khemer Rouge come to mind. The "abandon free trade lets go full bio" of the Lebensraum was in the same spirit.

Arguing against all societal complexity is asking for a genocide, how unpersonal and not hate-driven it seems on the surface level.

Your sentiment makes sense on a "We deserve a optimal ratio of taxes vs outcome" solution.

roncesvalles• 2 days ago

Imagine all the times this has already occurred somewhere in the world.

javawizard• 2 days ago

HuggingFace got hacked by an AI. What stuck out to me was the guardrail asymmetry. The attacker had no constraints, but HF's response ran afoul of the abuse guardrails, forcing them into an unplanned switch to local models.

This, to me, is the more interesting bit of the article.

I don't really know what a good solution looks like, but yeah, that's annoying.

rimworld• 2 days ago

aka tokenize everything

nailz1911• 2 days ago

arte.tv released a documentary about measuring and registering land just a month ago @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7AfiJs5Gk (Romania: The Unmeasured Land | ARTE.tv Documentary)

UltraSane2• 2 days ago

Enterprise storage arrays have immutable snapshot functionality that makes ransomware easy to recover from.

iAMkenough• 2 days ago

What does it take to delete a snapshot?

ExoticPearTree3• 2 days ago

Depends on the vendor. Some just admin access to the array, other require a two person authorization to delete it.

UltraSane2• 2 days ago

local admin credentials or two factor or the BEST is a immutable time-lock, so a snapshot cannot be deleted before the retention period that was set when it was taken expires

iamgopal• 2 days ago

would blockchain could have prevented it ?

ceejayoz• 2 days ago

No.

spwa4• 2 days ago

Amateurs. Everybody knows you should never wipe databases. You should install a cronjob that makes a random, unrecoverable change on a regular (but random) basis.

khurs3• 2 days ago

    Security firm KELA... has doxxed the hacker as Zakaria Mahdjoub, an individual from Oran, Algeria.

If I was an evil hacker, I would only hack countries my country hated or did not have extradition agreements with. Like the Russian hackers do.

Algeria has a extradition treaty with Romania:

https://periodicos.processus.com.br/index.php/egjf/article/v...

basilikum3• 2 days ago

Or just have Opsec.

khurs3• 2 days ago

I think there are very few hackers in the world who can hack a national government and not get identified, as the budgets and resources at the state level are enormous, and include ability to seek international help

mdavid626• 2 days ago

Why not just change ownership then? I'd bet some people would be interested to pay some money for that...

ajb2• 2 days ago

The UK used to have a distributed system - everyone had to have a solicitor store "deeds" of their property, which were a sort of paper blockchain of all the transactions the land had been in since - I don't know, since records began I guess. Since we got a centralised land registry cheaper solicitors have binned these, but some properties still have them as a historical record.

nutjob2• 2 days ago

Not sure what you mean by 'binned'. In some Common Law jurisdictions the deed document represents the property and whoever psychically holds of the deed controls the property. Any centralized recording system merely records the last known status of the deed and additional information such as the nominal owner, mortgage holders, etc.

ajb2• 2 days ago

In the UK, the old common law rule does not apply to land that has been registered centrally, that is then the legal definition of who owns the property. However there are still properties that are not registered and for those, the rule you describe is still applicable; the holder of the deeds is the owner.

Registration is now compulsory on sales, but that only came in in 1990.

As to what I mean by binned, I mean literally binned, thrown away.

lbschenkel• 2 days ago

Not sure if by "centralised recording" you are referring to the UK way or how it is implemented in general (civil law) but I can say that in Brazil the registry definitely does not have only the last deed.

In Brazil the books are append-only, they have the whole history of thay piece of land since records began. If it was a bigger plot that was dismembered, it is there too. When ownership changes you have to register the contract/terms of transfer/sale separately in a different process, but that does not change legal ownership and you still must go to the registry and register that registered transfer/sale in the registry, and the paperwork you get is a new certificate of registration which is a new snapshot of the books and includes that whole history from the very beginning. There is no copy or certificate you can can get from the land registry without including that whole history.

mr_toad• 2 days ago

since records began I guess

Possibly since 1086

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book

hinkley7• 2 days ago

You’ll see this as a plot device in some Regency pieces. Someone gets ahold of the physical deed to a property and now there’s drama.

ghaff9• 10 hours ago

There also used to be bearer bonds. In part because of concerns about money laundering, a lot of more or less untraceable large monetary instruments have gone away.

sebow• 2 days ago

[Fairly off-topic and political]

There's a growing (retarded) perspective, not only here in Romania but in most of the EU, that we must digitalize at all costs; this itself is obviously not a problem, but it usually comes with the removal of the "traditional" options too. The same goes for payments (removal of cash) and basically every aspect of the administration/society where this could be applied. The most recent concrete example for Romania is the mandatory digital signature by ANAF (IRS equivalent) for all companies.

Unlike other regions of the West: NA/WE/rest of the West (SK, JP, etc.), in EE, people (*younger generations, explained below) don't often think about the aspects of confidentiality that much, or if they do, they usually apply it incorrectly (either IRL [filming in public] or online ["I've accepted a draconian TOS that gives the company rights to all of my data, but I haven't actually read any of it, and now I'm invoking my "GDPR rights" against said company."]).

It does not take a genius or a historian to observe that while the older generations do not have this "problem" (they're very skeptical of the gov. [at least in certain aspects], in an almost american fashion — explained by the fact that they've experienced communism), younger generations position themselves in the extreme opposite; they despise the older generations ("boomers") for being luddites and somehow blame them for the gap in civilizational progress between WE and EE. There is a legitimate point here, of course, but it should be noted that the argument is almost always presented in an emotional, overwhelmingly irrational fashion, and almost never includes comparisons between the centralization done by the state in the past [communists] and the new one attempted by current govs [but digitalized]. (This delves into a broader socio-cultural divide between the generations that includes other aspects like religion, traditions, etc.)

The biggest portion of the so-called "IT people" who call for this "digitalization wave" are midwits, "inverse luddites" (they don't care about the implications), and, in smaller numbers, grifters and second-order beneficiaries (on the "digitalization" gov. projects). Obviously, it should be mentioned that, despite progress, nepotism and corruption are still present, and there are cases where gov. contracts are not given to the best candidate.

As a person who's both working in the IT sector and not a boomer (despite the impression of my comment), "we" should be careful about enabling totalitarians in our endeavors."Hackers" is just one reason out of a multitude of other reasons for not abandoning the sacred paper (see the ES+PT incident one year ago).

AdrianB12• 2 days ago

I don't think that most competent IT people are pushing for digital-only systems. The people that I see pushing for digitalization are either clueless politicians or corrupt or incompetent IT people selling snake oil. The sad part is that the snake oil sellers are probably a majority already, so fighting against politicians and snake oil sellers is a tought one.

luciana1u• 2 days ago

we spent centuries building a system to track who owns what land and then put the whole thing in one database that can be deleted with a single compromised password

charcircuit3• 2 days ago

Why is deleting the whole database a valid operation? The system should make that impossible.

daneel_w2• 2 days ago

Why is deleting a row in a table a valid operation? Why is deleting a table in a schema a valid operation? Most likely they had full privileged access to the database.

charcircuit3• 2 days ago

had full privileged access to the database

Why does full access include the ability to delete read only data that should never ever be deleted for the rest of time?

It's like building a self destruct button that ignites the physical records. It's an unnecessary risk to make such a dangerous thing.

Tangurena23• 2 days ago

Hackers would do it from the operating system level - stop the database executable, then delete the files used to store the database. Likewise, many organizations store the backups on a network share, where a hacker could delete the files.

Permissions inside the database should be segregated. The credential used by the webserver should not have enough permissions to DROP DATABASE. Just the appropriate selects/updates/inserts.

Likewise, if you are storing backups on the same network (as opposed to a tape backup), network permissions should allow writes/creates but not deletes.

puritanicdev• 2 days ago

Well, the land registry database in Serbia hasn't been working for two months now; the government hasn't issued any announcement so far, except for generic system-issue information we get from LRD support. Weird, hopefully we weren't hit too

riazrizvi• 2 days ago

Many many times, entire armies have been sent in to adjust another country's land registry.

osinix2• 2 days ago

The backups got wiped together with the systems, so they were reachable from same network. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup. Good they had an offline copy, but a system this important should have that as regular schedule, not depend on luck.

abanana• 2 days ago

That was my thought exactly on reading that line: that is not a backup. (Ok, the word isn't strictly defined, but you know what I mean.) They have said there's a "real" (offline) backup as well, luckily, but that just reinforces that the "pretend" backup was irrelevant and wasn't even worth mentioning in the writeup.

teravor• 2 days ago

    > backup the attacker can reach is not a backup

you can have append-only backup systems.

alok-g2• 2 days ago

Any guidelines on how to back up such that the attacker cannot reach (when the hacker otherwise had some valid credentials)?

pqdbr2• 2 days ago

This is how we implemented this at our company:

- We have 2 sources of data that we must backup to continue existing as a business; our postgres and binary files in S3. Everything else is derivable (elasticsearch, so on).

- For postgres, we use barman. With the help of opus/fable, you can get a streaming replication backup working in no time. We have one into another server in the same datacenter (we use baremetal) and another one in another server in a different datacenter.

- We then have a last resort barman backup with bi-weekly base backups + WAL streaming to S3 (both the base backup and WALs). It sends these backups + wal segments into an specific S3 bucket that has object lock in compliance mode. This is a feature from AWS S3 that even the most privileged account credentials (super admin) can't turn off nor delete the files before the object lock, which is 10 days in our case. Object lock compliance mode can only be extended, never shortened.

- For S3, we store them into another versioned bucket, with lifecycle rules to also expire non current versions (== deleted objects) after 10 days. No point in object lock compliance here because it would only protect objects for the most recent 10 days, and you gain nothing. What we do instead: the app servers only have access to these bucket tru an IAM credential that can't delete old versions (so deleted objects have to expire manually via the lifecycle rule) AND this IAM credentials also can't change the object policy.

IMHO, this protects us enough so that even in the worst case scenario (ransomware) we have 10 days to sort everything out and recover our AWS access.

And yes, we test the S3 barman restoration and it works fine. Data loss is at max 5 minutes due to the archive_timeout=300s on the primary.

For the streaming replications in the two servers I mentioned, it's less <1ms, but those wouldn't protect us much in the case of the ransomware - even tough we use tailscale and one compromised server can't ssh into the other.

osinix2• 1 day ago

You can use old school way. You can have a tape backup, ssd, or a device that is not connected to the network constantly. Copy there and unplug the device.

m0llusk• 2 days ago

Seems like property ownership histories could be one of the few good applications of blockchain technology.

tracker1• 2 days ago

Offline and pull based backups FTW... This is why I advocate for a pull or at least push/pull model for backups... where the remote system pulls backups out of your production environment, or otherwise from a drop point. Because a corrupt production system that controls backups can corrupt backups.

If your production system at most runs a backup to a drop site, then your backup facilities pull down versioned backups from there, you can better ensure older backup files are intact. More so by not allowing the two to see each other at all and not using backup accounts from a system that can access production resources.

khurs3• 2 days ago

This is why I advocate

No need to advocate on established best practices. The 3-2-1 rule and its variations are already common place and often mandated by standards/investors and partner contracts.

https://connection-technologies.co.uk/help/backup-disaster-r...

tiberius_p• 2 days ago

The majority of people have paper documents from the land registry. Digitalization of the land registry is a fairly recent development in Romania so people almost always requests papers when they register their land. In the event that all the digital data or large parts if were lost it would be possible to reconstruct it from the papers and interpolate the missing parts if any.

danieldrehmer• 2 days ago

Dibs on Vlad's castle

dredmorbius7• 2 days ago

Poor password practice and policy, and likely a lack of 2FA / physical token security, seem to have contributed to this breach.

Posts and screenshots apparently by the alleged attacker show "P@ssw0rd" and other well-known / readily-guessable passwords from the hacked systems:

<https://spear.cx/Thread-Selling-RO-Thy-arss-shall-be-spanked...>

<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iZc93XfViOk7izusgIG1ni7Kmsx...>

Originally noted, without references, by ExoticPearTree here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48978836>.

NB: If you're going to point out stupidity verging on cliched tropes, do so with sufficient evidence that it doesn't read as a tired and unsubstantiated canard. The fact that this does happen (and apparently did) doesn't mean it's necessarily the case in any specific instance.

hinkley7• 2 days ago

For me the first 2FA devices I’d had were for work but for my friends it was for a world of Warcraft. And it was years until my bank offered 2FA. I still think about that every time there is a breach.

Blizzard gave hardware tokens out to the entire convention one year. Smart phones became a variable not long after and then they didn’t make them mandatory but game guilds almost universally did. Especially for officers.

johnnyApplePRNG• 2 days ago

Incompetent bureaucrats strike again.

News at 11.

DesiLurker• 2 days ago

I know people flip out when they hear the word crypto but this is exactly why you need blockchain. immutable land registry thats public(anonymized).

lrvick• 2 days ago

Centralized tech is an evolutionary dead end and all who attempt it will continue to learn the same lessons.

ggm• 2 days ago

Under the Australian Torrens title system, paper is no longer authoritative and if you bring a deceased estate title document to the registry they keep it after updating the titles registry database, unless you ask to get it back and it's stamped to mark it superseded. I know because I've done this journey.

3 2 1 people.

lorreyfum• 2 days ago

Who was there first?

rzerowan• 2 days ago

Tangentially reminds me of what happened to the South Korean gov data center [1] where a no-backup ~900TB data center got erased due to a battery fire.

Withno external backups piecing together all the lost functions must havebeen hair raising, and more forensic archeolgy than data recovery.

Last i heard i think they had restored a quarter of the lost services/data.

[1] https://www.intermediagroup.org/south-korea-data-loss/

spicymaki• 1 day ago

This is going to sound controversial, but sometimes it is good to have a paper copy stored in a secure vault.

ElTimuro• 1 day ago

could be a digital copy but stored in an offline vault

Greymon• 22 hours ago

why the backups being reachable from the same compromised environment. if the backup system accepts deletes with the same creds that run production, it is replication, not backups.

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Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

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