No passwords lost

No user names and passwords of embassy personnel were lost in an attempt to hack a government server on Wednesday, a US security firm confirmed.

Hackers attacked a government server but initial investigations showed no data was extracted.

The US security advisory firm yesterday informed the Malta IT Agency (Mita) that no data was lost and the attempted breach was unsuccessful.

Mita said it had asked its US-based IT security advisory firm to provide it with an assessment of the potential breach.

The preliminary analysis indicated that the hacking software had the potential to extract user names and passwords on the embassies' server only. The agency said it found no evidence that similar attacks were carried out on other government servers.

As a precautionary measure, Mita disabled the accounts of users on the embassies' server and others occupying sensitive positions.

Mita technical staff corroborated the information and analysed all the available data for the past two days, reaching the same conclusion.

A series of immediate preventive measures, set in place by Mita, was adopted within hours of the detection of the attempted breach, the agency said.

Although the risk of exposure was limited, all government workers changed their password immediately as a preventive measure. In fact, 67 per cent of all users had changed their passwords by 3 p.m. yesterday. The service call centre will be operated on a 24x7 basis until the exercise is concluded.

No public systems, such as e-government services, were affected and all its systems were back to normal.