ePUAP Down: Poland Pulls Public Services Portal After Cyberattack

ePUAP, the Polish online portal for dealing with public offices, has been switched off after a cyberattack, The Record reported, citing officials who spoke on Tuesday. The Digital Affairs Ministry has not said when the portal will come back.

Through ePUAP, individuals and companies send official paperwork, correspond with state bodies and handle administrative matters without visiting an office. According to a notice on a government website, the electronic mailboxes tied to the portal cannot currently be used by residents or public institutions.

What the government says happened

Krzysztof Gawkowski, the minister for digital affairs, announced in a social media post that the intrusion attempt had been spotted and halted. He said response teams moved at once and are now working to bring the portal fully back into operation.

The minister added that the systems run by the Central Information Technology Center remained safe. That agency looks after ePUAP along with other major state digital services.

A ministry spokesperson, Marek Gieorgica, told the Polish news agency PAP that the portal was not broken into and that the attack did not interfere with it. Switching it off was a safety step taken ahead of any harm, he said.

What remains undisclosed

Officials have not explained the method of the attack or named anyone behind it. Nothing has been publicly confirmed about intruders reaching government systems or taking sensitive data.

The ministry gave no schedule for the return of the portal. It said the service will restart after the security specialists finish their review. The Record also reported that the Trusted Profile digital identity system, which people use to reach public services and to sign official documents electronically, may be briefly affected.

Why it matters: other recent Polish incidents

The Record noted that Polish government bodies, infrastructure operators and private firms have faced repeated attacks in recent months. Two earlier cases involved companies rather than the state.

In October, Fakturownia, a Polish provider of online invoicing, disclosed a data breach that may have exposed details of its users, customers and business partners. In September, attackers took data from Qbusoft, a Polish supplier of software for healthcare, after a separate breach at the medical technology firm MyDr. Polish authorities said the MyDr case may have touched information about 19 million people and about 12,000 healthcare organizations.

For now, anyone who needs to file documents or read messages in an ePUAP mailbox cannot do so until the ministry says the portal is running again.

Source: The Record