Baltic States – CIS, Forum, Internet, Lithuania, Technology

The Seimas office confirmed to BNS Lithuania that the website had been subjected to a DDoS attack, when the attack source is more than one, often thousands of, unique IP addresses, making the service unstable or, in worse case scenarios, unavailable.

Parliamentary Speaker Loreta Grauziniene told Vilnius journalists on Monday that this was the first attack of such scale against the parliament.

"This is a long-term attack. This is probably the first attack on such scale," she added.

Rimtautas Cerniauskas, the head of the National Cyber Security Center under the Defense Ministry, told BNS that the situation was currently under control, with security measures applied.

"The Seimas website has been under the DDoS attack since 5 p.m. local time on Saturday, we managed it to the extent to satisfy specialists of the Seimas. We applied security measures to make put the website back in operation, the measures are never ideal – they always hinder something else," Cerniauskas said.

"The attacks come from around the world, if there was a statement to the police, we would start identifying the country. We are working to manage the incident," he added.

On Monday, the parliament is hosting a meeting of the executive committee of the World Congress of Crimean Tatars and an international conference on Mass Violations of Human Rights in the Occupied Crimea.

The parliamentary speaker said the Crimean Tatar event had not been identified as the target of the hacker attack.

"It is hard to say whether it has to do directly with the event. If it is in connection to the event, it clearly shows the efforts to keep the information from spreading worldwide, as the topic is highly relevant – issues of Crimean Tatars, human rights violations, their lives in these territories is becoming inhumane, they live under inhumane conditions. The international efforts are being focused, and someone may be unhappy about this," said Grauziniene.