Lithuanian president criticises delayed response to massive data breach at Registry Centre

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda has condemned the delayed public notification of a major data breach at the country’s Registry Centre, where 600,000 records were stolen, calling attempts to conceal the incident futile, LRT reports.

“The public should have been informed in real time, because the breach itself was already harmful—every day of delay in notifying society about that harm only added to the damage,” Nausėda said during a visit to Klaipėda on Thursday. “If we couldn’t prevent the initial harm, we could at least have avoided the additional harm. Unfortunately, that wasn’t done. I don’t know why they tried to sweep the dust under the rug, because in this case, the rug turned out to be transparent, and nothing could be hidden that way.”

The president described the scale of the stolen data and its sensitivity as a “serious problem,” stressing that lessons must be learned from the incident. While he acknowledged that authorities had taken steps to address the issue once identified, he reiterated that communication failures only worsened the situation.

“I think conclusions have been drawn, and there was an attempt to react immediately when the problems were identified. But once again, communication cannot be treated as an attempt to sweep dust under the rug,” Nausėda said.

He emphasised that the breach had consequences not only for individuals but also for institutions that suffered “real losses,” some of which he declined to discuss publicly due to national security concerns.

Nausėda placed primary responsibility on officials who failed to secure their systems, noting they should have been aware of the risks and potential consequences. He criticised some institutions for ignoring warnings about cybersecurity vulnerabilities, though he cited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a positive example of improved data protection in recent years.

“Unfortunately, some institutions still turn a blind eye to this. […] Today, we have institutions that receive warnings from competent authorities about security measures, but not all act on them,” the president said.