Hackers briefly disrupted the website of the authority running Germany’s September 26 general election, according to a spokesperson for the organization.
Threat actors hit the website last month and caused temporary disruption of the service.
The spokesperson stated that at the end of August, the website of the Federal Returning Officer only had limited accessibility for a few minutes due to a malfunction. The problem was analyzed and the technical concepts were further developed accordingly. The information for the public through the website of the Federal Returning Officer was ensured.
The website was used to publish the official results of the vote and it was hit by a distributed denial of service attack.
The attack however did not impact the IT infrastructure used to manage the election due to the defense implemented by the government technicians.
The federal prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into the incident. Government officials recently blamed Russian state-sponsored hackers of cyber espionage on MPs.
Berlin blames the hackers from Russia’s “Ghostwriter” group which reportedly specializes in spreading disinformation.
German intelligence believes they were trying to gain access to the private email accounts of federal and regional MPs and says Russia’s military intelligence service GRU is behind the attacks.
Image Credits : Expatica
Comments