Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly was forced to disconnect its information systems yesterday after detecting an attempted cyberattack overnight, paralyzing congressional business for a full day and prompting opposition lawmakers to warn that any decisions taken without normal access to legislative documents could later be challenged.
Congress President Yara Jiménez told the plenary at the start of the session that the intrusion attempt occurred between Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning. She said security personnel detected an effort to get into the Assembly’s systems and, following established protocol, moved to shut down several digital services to keep out intruders and prevent the theft of information. “The protocol was to shut down the systems to prevent intruders from gaining access,” Jiménez said, adding that the continuity of public administration had to take precedence.
To keep the plenary running with its systems offline, the Legislative Directorate published the day’s agenda in a special edition of the official gazette, La Gaceta, so that the matters lawmakers would take up remained a matter of public record. Jiménez said she had requested detailed reports from the Assembly’s Security Management office and its Information Technology Department to establish the scope of the incident and the actions taken during the response. Officials from the Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT) arrived at the Assembly in the morning to assist the technical evaluation.
The outage happened across the institution. The Integrated Legislative System, known as SIL, stores the digital versions of bills, updated texts, motions and institutional reports that lawmakers and staff rely on daily, and its loss left committees unable to consult basic documents. Seven committees were unable to meet as scheduled yesterday, and their sessions for today were left in doubt because agendas must be published at least 24 hours in advance.
No bills were voted on. The plenary itself proceeded only with its political-oversight segment before Jiménez, acting on a recommendation from the Technical Services Department, lifted the session in the late afternoon rather than risk debating legislation without the required public access to the relevant files.
The disclosure caught many lawmakers by surprise and drew sharp criticism over the delay in informing them. Several legislators argued they should have been told sooner and warned that interrupting the Assembly’s digital platforms could create procedural irregularities by limiting public access to official documents and proceedings. “In Costa Rica, public institutions have a legal and administrative obligation to report any type of attack or potential breach of public information,” Representative Claudia Dobles said during the session.
Members of the Frente Amplio, the Social Christian Unity Party and the National Liberation Party cautioned that agreements adopted without ordinary access to legislative documents could be exposed to later claims of nullity or unconstitutionality, and they urged Jiménez to release the final report from the Office of Information Security and Technology once the investigation concludes.
That report, they said, should establish the scope of the attack, determine whether any confidential or sensitive information was compromised, and set out the measures being taken to strengthen the Assembly’s defenses.
Later on, MICITT offered a more reassuring assessment, characterizing the episode as a “security event” detected on one of the Assembly’s servers that provides digital services to the public. The country’s Computer Security Incident Response Team, CSIRT-CR, said the activity was detected and contained thanks to existing controls, and that technical verification found no evidence that information hosted on the site had been compromised, altered or extracted.
On that basis, the incident was classified as a security event rather than an information-security breach, and the agency said it would continue supporting the Assembly’s technical review and the safe restoration of its services.
Authorities have not identified who was behind the attempt or disclosed a possible motive, questions that officials say will form part of the pending technical report. The incident lands as Costa Rican public institutions continue to harden their defenses following a series of cyberattacks on government systems in recent years.
