Poland’s state registry temporarily blocked by cyber incident

A suspected cyberattack disrupted Poland’s state registry systems on Wednesday, hampering access to key government services, local media reported.

The incident temporarily blocked access to the country’s PESEL registry, a central database that stores personal information such as names, birthdates and addresses, and is used to verify identities across healthcare, taxation and other public services.

Poland’s digital ministry confirmed the disruption but did not specify the cause. The ministry said that while access to some services was affected, no data had been compromised. PESEL assigns a unique number to all Polish citizens and foreign residents.

Local media cited a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers overwhelm systems with fake traffic to render them inaccessible. The identity of the perpetrators remains unknown.

Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said Polish cyberdefense teams regularly repel attempts to disrupt government systems.

“Poland is one of the most attacked countries in the world. These attacks often originate from Russia,” Gawkowski said in a statement. He added that no sensitive data was exposed in the latest incident but did not comment further.

The incident affected several digital services reliant on state registry data, including the mObywatel app used for identity and vehicle information, as well as Poland’s online tax reporting systems. The outage coincided with Poland’s tax filing deadline.

Cyberattacks targeting state registries have become increasingly common in Eastern Europe. In December, suspected Russian hackers breached Ukraine’s registry infrastructure, halting services for weeks. In January, Slovakia’s land registry was hit by what officials called the most severe cyberattack in the country’s history.

In Russia, unknown hackers also claimed responsibility earlier this year for breaching Rosreestr, the government agency overseeing property and land records.