Bulgaria's interior minister threatened in latest wave of hoax bomb emails
The latest wave of hoax bomb threats sent to hundreds of Bulgarian institutions also contained a threat against Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev, police cybercrime chief says.
Symbolic image · Photo: Apostelgreek2 / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped and resized)
Hoax bomb-threat emails that have been hitting Bulgarian schools, kindergartens, state institutions and airports in waves now also include a threat against Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev, the head of the cybercrime directorate at the GDBOP organized crime unit, Vladimir Dimitrov, told Nova TV on Sunday. The messages, sent about a day and a half earlier, said the minister would be harmed.
"We are working on several different versions," Dimitrov said, according to the state news agency BTA. It was not yet clear whether one or several people were behind the emails. An attempt to harm the minister could not be ruled out, but there was no firm evidence of one. The senders' main aim was to destabilize institutions and erode public trust, he said. The emails arrive in waves once or twice a week via compromised computers and servers worldwide, using Tor, VPNs and proxies.
Dimitrov urged schools and institutions to take every threat seriously and alert police without causing panic, adding that mass evacuations were not automatically required. The Interior Ministry, the DANS security agency and intelligence services have prepared action plans for the Oct. 25 presidential election, and no rise in election-related cyberattacks has been observed so far, he said.