Bulgarian authorities said they have arrested a young man for his alleged involvement in a cyber hack that stole millions of personal data of taxpayers.
The country’s cybersecurity police chief Yavor Kolev said the young man works for a cybersecurity company that protects IT systems against breaches.
The alarm was raised yesterday by Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA) in a statement that the millions of taxpayers’ data were stolen in June.
The nationality of the suspect was not disclosed by the cyber police.
The attack and theft of the data came into light after a supposed Russian hacker offered to sell the data to a local media company.
In a quick response, Bulgarian Finance Minister Vladislav Goranov told Reuters that about 3% of the NRA’s database was affected.
A spokesperson for the NRA, Rosen Bachvarov, told Reuters that:
“We have compared 30% of the data that went public and we confirm that it is the information kept by the NRA.”
A local media Bulgarian newspaper, 24 Chasa, said one file emailed by the purported hacker had more than 1.1 million identification numbers with income, social security and healthcare figures.
“Maybe this is the first case in Bulgaria which is successful and a lot of personal data has been stolen,” Interior Minister Mladen Marinov told local bTV channel.
