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The Bulgarian government announced on Tuesday that the postal service, which has been plagued by frequent technical problems since mid-April, has come under cyber attack from Russia.

“The cyber-attack, which has disrupted the work of the postal service since April 16, has the signature of Russian services,” Deputy Prime Minister Kalina Konstantinova told a news conference.

As a result of the attack, the transportation of letters and parcels abroad, the payment of bills and the payment of pensions to retirees were temporarily suspended.

Government adviser Vasiliev Velichkov, an information expert, lamented that the attack led to the permanent loss of part of the archive, without providing further details on the nature of the documents.

He explained that the information virus that attacked the Central Post Office in Sofia before it spread through the network was “designed not to affect data obtained from Russia and the former Soviet republics”.

The Bulgarian Post Network has more than 6000 computers, half of which are over 15 years old, so it is vulnerable to such attacks due to the lack of an appropriate anti-virus protection system.

According to the National Security Agency, “other public institutions” were hacked, but only on a small scale.

“Attacks have escalated since the war in Ukraine,” Weliskov stressed, referring to “an electronic war aimed at sowing anxiety and instability.”