Schaffhausen and Geneva also affected by Russian hacker attacks
Keystone-SDA
Russian hackers have targeted canton Schaffhausen, in northern Switzerland and the cities of Geneva and Sierre, paralysing their websites on Wednesday morning.
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Just before midday, canton Schaffhausen announced that its website was back online after a so-called Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Informatik Schaffhausen, working with an external provider, managed to completely fend off the attack. The administration’s operations were never affected.
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In the morning, Schaffhausen energy supplier SH Power also displayed an error message. However, its site was back online before midday. Meanwhile, the websites for the cities of Sierre and Geneva remained inaccessible.
The cantonal banks of Zurich and Vaud were hit on Tuesday, while the websites of several Lucerne municipalities were paralysed the day before.
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The National Cyber Security Centre anticipated these attacks during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. DDoS attacks flood websites and apps with so many requests that they become inaccessible, though no data is lost.
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The Russian hacker group NoName took credit for the attacks online. They were also behind the DDoS attacks linked to the Ukraine conference at Bürgenstock in June 2024. A year earlier, the group had paralysed Swiss federal government websites.
Translated from German with DeepL/sp
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