Army was also offline

Cyber attacks on ministries & authorities continue

Austria is being hit by a wave of so-called DDoS attacks. According to the Ministry of the Interior, these are not dangerous or unusual, but they are causing annoying outages.

(Bild: APA/dpa/Felix Kästle)

After various political parties had already reported cyber attacks on their web servers in the last few days, ministries and authorities were also hit on Wednesday morning. The Ministry of Defense and the Court of Audit suffered temporary outages.

The signature is similar to that of the attackers who targeted the websites of the KPÖ, ÖVP and SPÖ on Monday and Tuesday - these are therefore likely to be so-called DDoS attacks, the aim of which is to overload the web server. It is a comparatively primitive method of attack that does not require any hacker knowledge and which webmasters are often confronted with in their everyday lives. A few days before a national election, however, the accumulation of incidents is naturally causing particular concern.

Ministry of the Interior remains calm
However, the Ministry of the Interior is relaxed about the attacks. They were "warned" about the increased number of attacks on Tuesday afternoon. However, DDoS attacks are nothing unusual in principle and have been observed more frequently since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Increased DDoS attacks on domestic websites have been registered for a week now.

Mysterious threats are circulating on Telegram
Anonymous users claiming to be a hacker collective with links to Russia are boasting about the attacks on the messaging service Telegram. However, these claims cannot be verified. The Ministry of the Interior does not want to confirm an origin in Russia. However, it is known that various hacker collectives "market" their "successes" on the internet, it said. The Ministry of the Interior takes the alleged threat to sabotage the election on Sunday seriously. However, they do not see an actual threat to the implementation.

DDoS attacks occur every day
What is striking about the most recent DDoS incidents is the proximity to the National Council elections and the publicity generated by the parties' PR strategists. However, since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, websites of Western nations in Europe have been confronted with DDoS attacks on a daily basis, some of which are also published on Telegram, according to the Ministry of the Interior, putting the severity of the incidents into perspective.

DDoS attacks can usually be fended off: Due to their frequency, many websites have protective measures in place, which is why the damage is minimal. They become really problematic where money is lost in the event of outages - online stores, for example. The damage caused when information websites are temporarily offline is manageable in comparison. Nevertheless, the responsible authorities at the Ministry of the Interior have been called in.

ÖVP uses incident to attack the FPÖ
The People's Party used the incidents in the final spurt of the election campaign to attack the FPÖ. With its friendship agreement with Putin's party, the FPÖ had "documented a questionable relationship" with Russia. "The current hacker attacks on several Austrian parties and the ORF, which according to media reports are close to Moscow, show once again that this closeness of the FPÖ to Russia is dangerous," said ÖVP Secretary General Christian Stocker.