The Finnish Social Insurance Institute Kela is advising consumers to prepare for disruptions to electronic services such as e-prescriptions provided by pharmacies.
Kela said that its Kanta system, which is the backbone of e-prescription services as well as log-in routines requiring user identification, had been targeted by a suspected denial of service attack in recent days.
According to the state benefits provider, the Kanta system is also responsible for managing the nation's medical database, patient data archives and the Oma Kanta or My Kanta site, which allows patients to view their electronic prescriptions.
Officials say that service breaks caused by the suspected DoS attacks have also affected ID routines for some public sector websites. They include the Vetuma authorisation service provided by the state ICT organisation Valtori as well as ID services for the Tax Administration's Katso system, which provides companies or organisations with access to their data in 104 different public e-services.
A denial of service or DoS attack floods the targeted online service with so much traffic that legitimate users either experience delays using the website or can't access the site at all.
Kela reported that its e-prescription service was still experiencing disruptions on Saturday evening.
