Nezavisne novine: SARAJEVO, BANJA LUKA – Earlier invasion of Kosovo hackers on the internet sites of many institutions in the country and region, among which is the official site of BiH Parliament, has awaken fears of possible unauthorized use of the website and the data by skilled hackers.
Despite of that, it has been said in almost all institutions that their systems are well protected, while computer experts who are well-informed about their protection systems, claim that the situation in entity and state institutions is very bad. An anonymous knowledgeable expert claims that almost all institutions do not have an adequate protection from hacker attacks, and they also suffer from many weaknesses and lacks in the computer system. As an example he mentions the CIPS system, as one of the most sensitive institution when speaking of security. This system issues personal documents to citizens and so do many other institutions. He claims that this system, in which millions have been invested, is so sensitive that it does not work if, for example it snows outside. “Their luck, and the luck of other institutions with a very weak protection is because in our country there are not many people who have time and money to do hacker work”, says this expert.
In the institutions that have been awhile ago attacked by hackers, claim that their data is on safe place and the attacks on the web sites are much easier than an eventual entrance into the database.
In the Parliament, the Council of Ministries of BiH and the Government of the Federation of BiH state that by now they never noted any unauthorized attack on the internal systems. Web sites of these state institutions in contrary to their informational systems are much more sensitive to the hacker attacks. The last one happened last week when the hackers from Kosovo destroyed the web site of the Parliament of BiH, on which they left their messages.
“Our website is located on our provider’s server and it is not connected to informational systems of the Parliament, which is very well protected from the viruses and unauthorized attacks. It is almost impossible for anyone to access our system without authorization. Website is more exposed to the attacks because sometimes some so-called “holes” start to show up. Those holes are used by hackers when entering our site”, has been said by Zlatko Vukmirović, the chief of the Public Relations Sector of the Parliament of BiH. According to him, all data in informational system has the copies which are being kept on the external locations. In case of entrance into the informational system and data erasing, data can be returned quickly.
“We are currently implementing the project of the E-Government through which we ensured a total hardware and software protection of the informational system of the Council of Ministries and all other ministries. The Council of Ministries and ministries have by now had separated systems, but through this project we are connecting them all into the one information system. Supplemented part of the project is a maximum protection of the system from unauthorized attacks”, says Branislav Zimonjić, head of the IT team for the E-Government of BiH.
Boris Katalinić, expert coworker in the IT sector of the Federal Governement, says that the website is the most hurtfull because it is much easier for hackers to access than enter the informational system.