Slovak parliament (source: TASR)
Parliament was brought to a halt on Thursday amid what Speaker of Parliament Boris Kollár described as a "very serious" cyber incident.
According to the Office of the Parliament, issues with IT services were noticed in the morning and Kollár initially suggested this may have been because of a cyber attack.
However, the issue was later classified as a "cybersecurity incident" - a term covering any event that negatively impacts the functioning of a system or a programme as opposed to a cyber attack involving intentional action aimed at stealing data or disrupting a system.
"The initial analysis of this incident revealed that network communications exhibited abnormal behaviour. As a result, the functioning of all components, including voting devices connected to the network infrastructure of the parliament, was affected," Office of the Parliament spokeswoman Michaela Jurcová said.
The National Security Authority (NBÚ) is currently working on the problem, but is prevented by law from providing further details on the incident while it continues to deal with it.
But Kollár described it as "very serious".
"The source of the problem has yet to be identified, the technicians are on it," he said, adding that it will probably not be resolved either today or Friday.
It is unclear when the parliamentary session will resume. Kollár said he will be notified on November 2 whether the problem has been solved and if it has, parliament will convene the following day. If it has not been dealt with by then, the session will continue on November 8 at the earliest.
