Information Security Incident Trends in Public Administration

Abstract

Public administration is one of the most common targets of cyber threats. Cyberattacks against public and local governments are becoming increasingly targeted, sophisticated, and are capable of causing ever greater damage. Information systems security requires effective physical, logical and administrative measures, which needs knowledge of current trends in information security incidents. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of information security
incidents detected by the National Cyber-Security Centre of Hungary between 2019 and 2021 in order to identify national incident trends affecting public administrations. The paper focuses on how cyber attackers have responded to the Covid–19 pandemic and how this is reflected in national incident trends. A further objective of the analysis is to identify which sector was affected the most by incidents during the period under review and which incident types are typical for this sector. A further research question was the percentage of social engineering in the detected incident trends.