A malware has infected the Spanish Defense Ministry’s intranet, reported El País newspaper.
The malware is said to have been introduced to the intranet via email, and had been compromising the ministry's database for up to three months before being detected in early March.
The intranet in question has about 50,000 users, which include those in the ministry, the defense staffs, the military and units abroad.
It does not carry classified information, but the paper said its sources were concerned about a wider infection to other networks, suspecting a foreign power behind the cyberattack.
"There is a state behind it," the sources said, concluding that the malware was too technically complex to be done by standard hackers.
The Defense Ministry spokesman said the ministry would not comment.
Upon investigation, the scale of the intrusion turned out to be much larger than it was predicted at the beginning of the probe.
The malware might have been deployed to the ministry's intranet with the aim to gain access to "the technological secrets of the defense industry," the newspaper said.
"The industrial espionage of classified information held by companies that participate in programs of the Ministry of Defense poses a threat of the first magnitude to National Security," described the Annual Report of National Security 2018 .
The document approved in March 15 by the National Security Council does not allude to the cyberattack against the Ministry of Defense, but warns that cyberattack like this constitutes a" serious threat ".
Spain in no stranger of becoming a target of hackers or state-sponsored attacks.
The National Cryptologic Center (CCN), the Spanish intelligence agency within the National Intelligence Center, reported more than 38,000 cyberattacks in Spain throughout 2018.
Among those, 57 percent of them were said to have targeted governmental establishments.
The National Institute of Cybersecurity saw 111,519 incidents, of which 722 affected were critical strategic operators. Since 2014, the latter have suffered more than 2,300 attacks, with the financial, energy and transport sectors accounting to more than half of the cases.
One of the more recent cyberattack happened in February.
At that time, hackers attacked the Supreme Court of Spain website following the hearing for the trial of Catalan politicians accused of sedition and embezzling state funds during the October 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
