SUMAL - The Minister of Environment announces the stopping of the "offline" method of timber theft

The Ministry of Environment, Water, and Forests has made an important update to the SUMAL Avize application, part of SUMAL 2.0 — the national electronic system for tracking timber material aimed at stopping illegal logging and transportation. In a public message posted by Minister Diana Buzoianu, it was announced that the issue exploited by transporters — informally known as “offline theft” — has been blocked through a technical update of the application.

This update restricts the possibility of uploading timber transport permits to the server only from within the depot perimeter, eliminating the upload of documents from the route or outside the authorized zone.

Practically, before the update, transporters could:

1. issue a transport permit in SUMAL directly in the forest;
2. turn off mobile internet on their phone;
3. complete the entire route with the load;
4. after inspection or at the end of the transport, turn the internet back on and upload the permit, making the transport appear in the system as legal. This vulnerability was exploited for years by malicious operators to carry out repeated illegal transports, without these being recorded in real-time in the central database.

Why was the update necessary — official data

Authorities analyzed the system's behavior and discovered that, in the last 6 months, nearly 7,000 permits were uploaded to the server with a delay of more than 30 minutes from the time of issuance.

This indicates intentional use of offline functionality to avoid real control of the transport.

Following discussions with representatives of civil society and organizations specialized in forest protection, the ministry decided on the announced changes.

Diana Buzoianu mentioned that she reached this decision after discussions with environmental activists from the Forest Guardians: ”It was precisely this theft method that I discussed at the ministry with Bodnar Daniel and his colleagues from the Forest Guardians Association, whom I thank for the information and for the passion they put into stopping criminals and protecting our forests.”

The ministry worked in record time together with developers and representatives of the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) to prioritize the application update.

What the official statement says about the SUMAL 2.0 update

On the official website of the Ministry of Environment and in public notices, notifications about recent application updates have appeared:

December 5, 2025 – The Ministry announced an update to the SUMAL Avize application, including:

• improvements in communications, including in areas with weak signal;
• security and performance optimizations;
• verification of a 1 km radius from the depot before starting the transport, suggesting a limitation on issuing permits outside the authorized perimeter.

The official recommendation is for transporters to perform the update after delivering the permits to the destination to avoid data loss.

Additionally, in recent months, there have been successive updates to the SUMAL 2.0 mobile applications (including Sumal-Marcare and Sumal-Control) for overall optimization and software compatibility on mobile platforms.

Civil society reaction — Agent Green and the offline method

The NGO Agent Green was among the first organizations to publicly highlight the fraud method nicknamed offline / evaporation method, through which transporters recorded permits but did not upload them online during transport. Thus, they caused the loss of these in the real traceability process.

This method was detailed in a report by the organization, which listed multiple techniques of fraud in SUMAL 2.0 even before its operationalization.

The report emphasized that timber thieves could even delete the application after transport and reinstall it to hide offline data, thus facilitating a lack of traceability that went unnoticed by authorities.

Agent Green constantly criticized authorities for the lack of response, highlighting that this method had been known for years, but only now was it effectively addressed through a technical update.

Forestry engineer Dan Turiga states that:

”The SUMAL modification is a very welcome development, very late. The theft method eradicated with this update was one of the first malicious uses of the application by timber thieves. It is described in our report with the 10 methods of theft in the era of SUMAL 2.0.. It took more than 3 years to correct it. During all this time, it was excessively used for theft.”

By “our report,” Turiga refers to the report by Agent Green, available here.

At SUMAL — there still remain opportunities for fraud, believes the forestry engineer. Two important examples, according to him, are:

• the fictitious underestimation of actual dendrometric elements, resulting in additional unregistered timber extraction
• fictitious transports because the terminal used to configure the route remains the mobile phone.

Data requests from SUMAL are refused to journalists

The Ministry of Environment is involved in a legal case against PressHUB, in which it is accused of not providing open data from SUMAL 2.0 upon request by journalist Răzvan Chiruță, as part of the international project LORDS OF TIMBER, conducted in 2022-2023 and coordinated by British-Romanian journalist Crina Boroș.

The coordinator, specialized in data analysis, was subjected to an act of intimidation at one of the ministry’s offices, an episode condemned by the International Press Institute. The incident occurred after the London-based journalist requested the SUMAL data before seeking help from Romanian colleagues. The case was covered in a documentary by Channel 4.

Ultimately, the ministry refused to grant transparent access to the public data from the SUMAL application, even though, according to legislation, these are not secret or classified. PressHUB, where Chiruță was editor-in-chief at the time, filed a court case to obtain the data.

Currently, the case is in the appeals phase, with the first legal confrontation won by the media organization. The deadline for the appeal is March 18, 2026.

What’s next — SUMAL 3.0 and the fight against illegal logging

According to recent statements by the Minister of Environment, the development of SUMAL 3.0 is already underway and will incorporate artificial intelligence algorithms to:

• automatically detect suspicious behaviors in transports;
• generate real-time alerts;
• identify unusual patterns in the economic activity of the forestry sector.

The goal is to increase the efficiency of the monitoring system and firmly counter illegal logging in Romania’s forests.

The SUMAL 2.0 update represents an important technical step towards closing a major loophole for system fraud, as signaled by NGOs and observed by authorities.

Although other vulnerabilities and challenges regarding timber traceability and system frauds remain, recent adjustments demonstrate that technical solutions and political will can produce tangible results, even if their implementation has been delayed for years.