Szerepka: I think we will give up electronic registration in future

Embassy thinks about to facilitate the process of obtaining of Polish visas.

Poland's Ambassador tells «Euroradio» why they cannot overcome Belarusian hackers and how they are going to replace the electronic registration.

- Three weeks ago you told me you were going to Warsaw to seek measures to overcome the Belarusian hackers who intercepted the electronic forms for visa applications registration at the Polish consulate. Have you found anything?

- There will be no quick answers. We will probably give up the electronic registration in future. We are thinking of something else, like call centers. However, it requires a lot of technical training. You know, at this scale and the number of visas it is not an easy thing to do. We are thinking on how to facilitate the process of obtaining the Polish visa, but it won’t be an easy success. Now we decide which option to choose to grant the most effective work. We have not forgotten about this problem with the registration.

- Maybe it makes sense to give up the electronic registration now, if all the forms are intercepted by the hackers anyway?

- Not all the forms. In some consulates we made a division into categories: shopping, culture, sports, "vips", any political activity. There are limits in certain categories. And this makes it difficult for the hackers, because usually the greatest demand is for shopping visas. But if we had completely abandoned the electronic system, the queues would have only grown. After all, the work would be done much more slowly. And all this despite the current demand for visas!

- The head of the Belarusian “K” Command reproached the Polish Embassy in his interview to Euroradio, like, if you had passed technical information about your computer systems and programs, they would have been able to tell you how to overcome the hackers. Why are you not willing to cooperate with our law enforcement officers?

- We got the paper from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, I read it. These problems and the tips that they give us - our experts can handle all this themselves. We asked the Belarusians to work with those intermediaries who act in front of our consulates. They can easily be found and stopped. That was our main request - to deal the people working in front of our consulates, taking orders and performing the function of mediators for money. Technical characteristics of our systems have nothing to do with it, I think.

- There appeared information that Polish consular departments started issuance of long-term visas for a smaller term - not for a year, but for 3-6 months. Why is this happening?

- According to my information, the number of long-term visas is constantly increasing. I do not exclude that something like this might happen, but these are just individual cases.