System protection is strengthened by the National Technology and Research Infrastructure Network (EDYTE) to avoid new cyber attack like today’s one, which “blocked” intra-school exams, causing panic among the leadership of the Ministry of Education and the Institute of Education and Science and yelling at schools.

In the morning, the platform received up to 280,000 “connections” per second from unrelated people, which led to the “fall” of the system. The fear, of course, is the safety of the nationwide exams, which begin on Thursday. The heads of the Ministries of Education and Digital Governance, as well as the heads of EDYTE, who spoke with K yesterday, assure that there is no risk to the national exams. “The system for transferring subjects at lyceum exams is different from the system for nationwide exams, which cannot be affected by such malicious mass visits,” they emphasize. Of course, there is no shortage of insufficient security in the banking system and the slowness of Ministry of Education officials.

In particular, this morning it was planned to start intra-school and final exams in about 1,400 universities of the country in subjects from the Subject Bank. That is, there are more than 20,000 items in the bank in all subjects, and half of each internal exam is made up of them. The other half is chosen by the course instructor.

280 thousand connections per second

Shortly after 6 am, according to the relevant ministries, “The Subject Bank platform, operated by the Education Policy Institute and hosted on the EDYTE infrastructure, was subjected to a large-scale and long-term distributed attack (DDoS). Simply put, there were massive visits to the platform by third parties, up to 280,000 connections per second, which are designed to bring it down. These distributed DDoS attacks are maliciously designed to prevent users from freely accessing the system. They are not hacking the system and cannot access its components and data.“. Essentially, it is a malicious act of network congestion. For example, someone floods a company’s call center with calls and their customers can’t pick up the phone. So far, the amount of data sent by attackers to their targets is unknown. Usually this attack is not related to hacking the system. In some cases, the consequences of an attack can be important, at least on an impression level. Of course, sometimes a DDoS attack can also be used as a distraction to intercept sensitive information through parallel actions. “Imagine 5,000 unrelated people gathered at the entrance to a building. Wouldn’t that prevent his employees from entering the building?” described “K” by a high-ranking government official.