The cyberattack on the General Staff of the Armed Forces (EMGFA) was detected and reported, in August, to the Prime Minister, António Costa, by the “American Intelligence Services, through the embassy in Lisbon”, reveals the “Diário de Notícias” (DN), this Thursday.
The authors of this “prolonged and unprecedented cyberattack” managed to access documents considered “secret and confidential” sent by NATO to Portugal. US cyber spies have detected “hundreds” of these documents for sale on the “dark web”, writes DN.
Next week, “a high-level meeting” is scheduled to take place at NATO headquarters in Brussels, as the Atlantic Alliance “will have demanded explanations and guarantees from the Portuguese government” following this breach of security, whose “dimension of the damage is still being investigated.”
Following the alert from the US Embassy, the National Security Office (GNS), the National Cybersecurity Center and the National Cyber Defense Center “carried out a complete screening of the entire internal Defense communications system” and, according to sources heard by the DN, the experts “have identified computers in the EMGFA, in the military secret (CISMIL) and in the General Directorate of National Defense Resources, from where the documents were exfiltrated”. They also verified “that security rules had been broken for the transmission of classified documents”, using “non-secure lines”, despite the existence of “secure connections – the Integrated System of Military Communications (SICOM) – to receive and forward classified documents. ”.
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