Venezuelan Minister of Science and Technology Gabriela Jiménez. Photo: X/@lubrio.
Venezuelan platforms have experienced over 30 million cyberattacks per minute without a break since July 28. This was reported by Venezuelan Minister of Science and Technology Gabriela Jiménez this Monday, August 12, at the National and State Security Council held by President Nicolás Maduro.
Presenting a full report of the ongoing cyberattacks Venezuela has received since the presidential elections, Minister Jiménez said that 25 institutions have been affected by cyberattacks, and 40 are being investigated.
“Among the cyberattacks, we can see that 65% were the denial of service type, affecting the servers of state institutions and international links,” she added, explaining that this affects the servers. Meanwhile, 17% of the attacks are related to the theft of information associated with emails and contain malicious software, route hijacking, DNS expansion, and misconfiguration of state pages and portals.
She added that over the weekend, CANTV’s IP addresses were hijacked to cause the servers to crash. CANTV is the biggest telecom corporation in Venezuela and is state-owned.
All platforms have been attacked
“All state platforms have been attacked in multiple ways,” said Minister Jiménez when presenting the report. She highlighted that among the affected systems, the National Placement System (SNI) received four million attacks per hour. The SNI is the placement platform for new students in Venezuelan universities.
During her speech, Jiménez explained that renowned international cybersecurity platforms such as NETSCOUT report that the Venezuelan State has been one of the countries most affected by cyberattacks between July and August. These events are recorded on international cybersecurity platforms such as NETSCOUT and Kaspersky, which showed an increase in data traffic to Venezuela the day after the elections, leading Venezuela to be the most attacked country in Latin America between July and August.
In this regard, she said that the volume, level of sophistication, incidence, and duration of the attacks demonstrate a great technological and financial capacity.
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Most cyberattacks come from the United States
Regarding the origin of the attacks, Minister Jiménez said that 98% come from farm services with desktop computers and less than 2% from mobile technology platforms.
Jiménez also said in her report that when analyzing the source of the attacks against platforms in Venezuela, the leading country from which they were launched was the United States.
“In addition to these attacks, this has been simultaneously linked to the use of social media platforms where they generate trends of media cyberattacks,” she said, adding that although “90% of the attacks have not been successful, they nevertheless generate climates of fear,” highlighting that these affect Venezuelans’ psyche and create a negative perspective against the country.
The report concluded by recommending the creation of a National Cyber Security Council to strengthen technological platforms.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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