UN Confirmed Cyberattack
The United Nations (UN) has confirmed an internal confidential UN document describing a breach of dozens of servers.
An internal document from the UN Office of Information and Technology (OICT) concluded that about 42 servers were “compromised” and another 25 were deemed “suspicious” at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the UN Office in Vienna, and the UN Office in Geneva, which houses a range of political and development units, including an office spearheading the Syria peace talks, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and the Economic Commission for Europe.
According to the report, the breach started in mid-July and IT officials issued an alert to their teams on August.
The UN has not been able to determine the identity of the hackers.
A wide range of data including user accounts, internal documents and databases, the human resources system, antivirus programs, and other “infrastructure components” may have been compromised.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric stated on January 26 that “the attack resulted in a compromise of core infrastructure components,” classifying the attack as “serious.”
