Lithuania’s interior minister calls for resignation of IT department head after cybersecurity breach

Lithuania’s Interior Minister Vladislavas Kondratovičius has urged the head of the ministry’s IT and Communications Department, Viktorija Rūkštelė, to resign following reports of a potential cyber breach affecting employee accounts across 50 institutions under the ministry’s oversight, 15min.lt reported Sunday.

According to the outlet’s sources, Kondratovičius conveyed his position to Rūkštelė on Monday. The call for resignation comes as authorities investigate possible unauthorized access to the accounts of employees at institutions subordinate to the Interior Ministry.

Last week, 15min.lt first reported that responsible agencies were probing circumstances surrounding the suspected breach. At the time, Kondratovičius neither confirmed nor denied the scale of the incident, though sources suggested ministry leadership may have been aware of the breach—affecting dozens of VRM IT system accounts—as early as May. The issue was reportedly discussed in interagency meetings.

The incident follows a separate high-profile data breach at Lithuania’s Centre of Registers (RC), where over 600,000 real estate records were allegedly stolen, resulting in financial damages exceeding €111,000. The Data Protection Inspectorate estimates around 500,000 residents were affected by the theft. The Prosecutor General’s Office is leading the investigation into the RC case.

Adrijus Jusas, the former head of the Centre of Registers who resigned over the breach, stated that the large-scale data leak was detected in early April but that legal restrictions tied to the ongoing pre-trial investigation—launched by prosecutors on April 5—limited public disclosure. The Centre of Registers maintained its obligation was to notify affected individuals, not to announce the criminal probe to the public.

Opposition lawmakers in the Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) have since collected the necessary signatures to initiate a temporary parliamentary investigative commission to examine the circumstances of the data theft.