Argentina: The Government alleged a lack of investment due to officials who rejected the SIDE DNU

The official government site crashed this Wednesday night and Secretariat of Innovation, Science and Technology confirmed that it was a cyber attack. In the first minutes of Thursday, although it was possible to enter the website argentina.gob.ar, most of its sections were still inaccessible. Operation became normal as the hours passed.

That organization reported on its networks that the attack by cybercriminals was detected at 9:30 p.m. and stated that it was caused by “the deplorable state” in which “the previous governments left the electronic management systems, platforms and applications“.

In addition, he attacked the deputies and senators who rejected DNU 656/2024, which granted million-dollar funds for the SIDE, and assured that as a result of that decision the necessary investment “in infrastructure and computer security” could not be made.

The link “about this site” It was one of the last where the message could be seen “hacked by h4xx0r1337 $ gov.eth”, until then the same text that was visible in the rest of the sections that had been left without content appeared.

“503 Service Unavailable. “No server is available to handle this request,” it read next to a completely white screen. This basically means that there is no server available to handle a request.

On the affected website, there were also problems entering the My Argentina and the Sube Card links, or those intended to obtain or renew the DNI and passport, and to manage the criminal record certificate. The same problems were present in most of the spaces intended for “Documentation”, “Transit and Transportation” and “Work and Employment”, and the links in the “More topics” section.

The programmer, professor, journalist and author Marcelo Firtman, explained on the social network a “defacement”, that is, a change in content.

Thus, they placed political messages in several sections, including insults towards Javier Milei, and multimedia content, for example, a video of the rapper “Homer el Mero Mero”, modifying the normal structure of the website.

Given this scenario, the experts agreed that the best thing for users was to avoid entering these platforms, at least for the moment, so as not to expose credentials and protect sensitive personal data.

In addition to holding previous efforts responsible for considering that they generated a beneficial scenario for cybercriminal attacks, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology charged against “a group of deputies and senators of the National Congress who chose to play high politics instead of guaranteeing the funds allocated to the fight against these crimes.

He specifically spoke of “an urgent investment to strengthen infrastructure and computer security“, contemplated in DNU 656/2024, that “could not be carried out by this Government” because of those officials.

At the end of November, the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) suffered a cyber attack at the end of November, but the National Government officially recognized the “incident” several years later.

That event affected all of the organization’s headquarters and, in addition to leaving the entity without an administrative network, it generated concern about the plans for the CAREM (Argentine Central of Modular Elements) nuclear reactor. Clarín confirmed that the attack was ransomware.