Romanian land registry hack freezes property market

On 14 July 2026 a hacker identified as “ByteToBreach”, believed to operate from Algeria, accessed the Romanian National Cadastre Authority (ANC PCI) with valid credentials and deleted the entire digital land‑registry database. The breach erased ownership records, internal documents and staff accesses, taking all online cadastral services offline.

ANC PCI director Dan Cîmpean described the attack as “not particularly complex” and said it could have been prevented. Of the €135 million invested in digitising the registry over two decades, roughly €305 000 was allocated to cybersecurity, despite warnings from the national cyber‑security agency.

Since the outage, notaries cannot record transactions, citizens cannot obtain title extracts, and no house sales, mortgages or ownership transfers are possible. The disruption threatens 150‑170 000 annual property deals, many of which were set to close before a tax‑rate reduction on 1 August. ByteToBreach has previously targeted land‑registry systems in Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania.