Police opens probe into hacking of BNS system

The launch of the investigation into unlawful login to the information system was reported by the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau after hearing a plea from BNS.

The fake news titled The Echo of Syria in Latvia: US Troops Poisoned with Yperite was published on the agency’s system on Wednesday afternoon in the Lithuanian and Russian languages. A probe conducted by BNS revealed unlawful use of the administrator account of www.bns.lt content management system via Tor system servers that guarantee anonymity.

The article said that American troops in Latvia had been poisoned with mustard gas and that mustard gas lying on the bottom of the Baltic Sea is “an ecological bomb” and “only the Kremlin knows when it will explode”.

“We take the incident seriously and have taken every possible measure to establish the circumstances. A comparison of the two texts has revealed that the story was first written in Russian and then translated into the Lithuanian language with mistakes,” Vaidotas Beniušis, deputy CEO of BNS for content, said in a statement.

In January, BNS data center in Estonia was also targeted by a cyber attack following a series of cyber attacks on news portals delfi.lt, 15min.lt and lzinios.lt over the past few years.