Norwegian Parliament Suffers Cyber Attack

The Norwegian Parliament announced on Tuesday that it fell victim to a cyber-attack that targeted its internal email system. According to Stortinget director Marianne Andreassen, explained that hackers breached email accounts for elected representatives and employees alike, from where they stole various amounts of information.

According to public broadcaster NRK, several members and staff of Norway’s main opposition Labour Party were affected .

The Norwegian National Security Authority (NSA) assisted in countering the attack. “We have been involved for a few days,” NSA spokesman Trond Oevstedal said. “We are assisting parliament with analysis and technical assistance.”

Unauthorized inpiduals managed to gain access to the email accounts of several elected members of parliament and also to some accounts belonging to parliament employees.

Norwegian Parliament

Inpiduals whose accounts were exposed in the attack have been informed, and a report has been filed with the Norwegian police. On other hand, no information has been released regarding what kind of cyber-attack was perpetrated against the Norwegian parliament or who was responsible for it.

Later, the hackers were able to gain access to influential accounts for Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Apple and others and share a scam asking for bitcoin.

The accounts, along with those of former President Barack Obama, Kanye West, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg have posted similar tweets seeking donations via Bitcoin to their profiles.

“Everyone asked me to give back, now it’s time,” Gates’ tweet said, and promised to double all payments to the Bitcoin address within the next 30 minutes.

“We can confirm that this tweet was not sent by Bill Gates,” Gates’ spokesman told CNN Business. “This appears to be part of a larger problem that Twitter is facing. Twitter is aware and restoring the account.”

The number of attacks is probably one of the largest security incidents in Twitter’s history. A hack that took the account of one of these leaders could have devastating consequences.

A breakthrough like this is particularly pertinent not just because of any managed financial scam, but because many world leaders use Twitter – and some, like President Donald Trump, use it to announce major policy decisions.

A year earlier, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked, raising concerns about whether any account on the platform could actually avoid a hack. The mechanism with which this hack occurred was fixed by Twitter after the Dorsey hack and there is no reason to believe that the blame is here.