To quote an old song: “Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be” unless I have important data on a government network, in which case it’s not quite the country for me. Or at least, that’s the case after a recent data breach, which targeted the Foreign Ministry’s data network.

According to Union-Bulletin, the network was targeted and spied upon for several years before the breach was noticed. It still might have gone undetected, if not for an outside tip that alerted the Ministry to it.

Even after its discovery, the hacking was not disclosed until now, in order to assist with the investigation and to avoid alerting the spies that Finland was on to them. At that point, it became a game of “We know they know, but they don’t know that we know that they know.” (Not a direct quote.)

Defensive Measures

Finland’s government approved a national cybersecurity strategy earlier this year, designed to support counter-threats and protect important information and infrastructures. However, while the plan does include setting up a Cybersecurity Center that will monitor threats, that will not be complete until early 2017.

This is pretty bad news all around for the Foreign Ministry, but the best reassurances it can provide is that things could have been worse. The most sensitive information contained in the network was not transmitted, so it presumably remained safe. Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja offered assurances that no other nations’ data was jeopardized by the attack, although they cannot confirm nor deny any suspects that may be responsible for it.

Protection and Detection

Still, we need to consider the fact that the network was jeopardized and spied upon for somewhere around four years. Protection from data breaches, cyber attacks, and hackers is all well and good, but if and when it fails, detection is equally essential to identify and resolve attacks early on. A vast amount of confidential information was put at risk in that time, and it is not an issue to be taken lightly.

Cyber security is not an option. In today’s connected, electronic society, it is a necessity.

Photo by archer10 (Dennis) (68M Views)