A hacker breached Romania’s National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising, wiping the country’s land registry database and halting real-estate transactions after a failed extortion attempt.

Key Points

• The breach at the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising (ANCPI) occurred on July 14, forcing the agency to take its systems offline.
• The attacker, identified as Zakaria Mahdjoub (alias ByteToBreach), gained access using valid credentials and deleted both live data and backups.
• Stolen internal documents and employee credentials were subsequently posted for sale on a known hacking forum.
• ANCPI is currently rebuilding its entire network from scratch, though officials reportedly recovered an offline backup to prevent long-term data loss.
• This incident marks the latest in a series of land registry hacks targeting government agencies across Europe and beyond over the last three years.

Why it Matters

The total loss of digital land records has paralyzed Romania's real-estate market, preventing notaries from processing transactions and citizens from verifying property ownership. This event highlights the critical vulnerability of national infrastructure to extortion-driven cyberattacks and underscores the necessity of maintaining secure, offline backups for essential government services.