On Wednesday afternoon, hackers carried out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the websites of several Croatian institutions, including the Ministry of Finance, the Tax Administration, the Croatian National Bank and the Zagreb Stock Exchange. All websites were back online at around 8 pm.

“There was a cyberattack on part of the state IT infrastructure, as a result of which the website of the Tax Administration was unavailable. The services reacted immediately, everything was repaired and is working normally again. Now the forensic experts have to find out if there were any consequences,” the Minister of Justice, Public Administration and Digital Transformation, Damir Habijan, told Nova TV.

IT expert Gordan Akrap said that DDoS attacks are among the most common and widespread attacks.

“It’s a script, like a virus. When you send it, you infect a large number of computers that all try to connect to that website, choking off traffic and disrupting website activity,” Akrap explained.

He said: “There is a way to prevent such attacks, and that is through Cloudflare, which verifies who you are when you try to connect to a website, preventing these types of attacks.”

Hospital in Zagreb attacked on Thursday morning

Such attacks aim to prevent users from accessing the attacked website, he added.

As Nova TV learnt unofficially, no data was compromised and the attack caused no damage other than the fact that the websites were unavailable for several hours. The cause of the attack was not immediately clear.

The Zagreb Clinical Hospital Centre (KBC) was the target of a hacker attack early Thursday morning, forcing the hospital to shut down all systems.

The hospital said in a press release that the systems can be brought back online once security checks are completed. It added that this will not jeopardise the health of patients.

“Patient safety is not jeopardised, all emergency patients are taken care of. Everything is much more stressful for our employees, but it works,” said Milivoj Novak, assistant director for health care quality and supervision.