Hacker ByteToBreach wipes Romania land registry ANCPI database after failed extortion, halts property sales
Notaries across Romania cannot authenticate property sales or register mortgages after a hacker wiped the national land registry database, Cybernews reports. Attacker ByteToBreach breached cadastre agency ANCPI with valid credentials, deleting data after a failed extortion bid.
A hacker wiped Romania's entire national land registry database after a failed extortion attempt, according to Cybernews, halting property transactions nationwide. The attacker, using the handle ByteToBreach, breached the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising, known as ANCPI, using valid credentials and deleted the stolen data, including internal documents, source code, and citizen records. Notaries across the country say they can no longer authenticate property sales, register mortgages, or issue land ownership records. Romania typically sells between 150,000 and 170,000 residential properties a year, according to industry data cited by Cybernews. Cybersecurity firm KELA has linked the ByteToBreach account to an individual based in Oran, Algeria, who researchers describe as tied to earlier breaches of government registries in Sweden, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania. Romanian officials say ANCPI holds offline backup copies of the wiped data and is rebuilding its network from scratch, though the agency's systems had already been offline for about a week at the time of reporting.