Swiss federal administration hit by hacker attack

Federal administration affected by hacker attack Keystone-SDA

Hackers have attacked the Swiss federal administration. Among other things, telephones, email and various federal websites and specialist applications were affected. No data was leaked, according to the federal government.

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As a result of the attack, the federal administration was affected by a disruption to its IT systems for around 45 minutes on Friday morning, the media office of the Federal Office of Information Technology and Telecommunications (FOITT) told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA. The news portal Blick.ch first reported on the incident.

Thanks to “countermeasures, the situation was stabilised”, the FOITT continued.

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Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks involve overloading websites and applications with targeted requests so that they are no longer accessible. No data would flow out during a DDoS attack. The FOITT and the Federal Office for Cybersecurity (FOCBS) are jointly analysing the attack and defining the appropriate measures, according to the statement.

The federal administration has already been targeted by hackers on several occasions, including during the Ukraine conference at Bürgenstock in June 2024, when overload attacks on federal websites were detected. According to the FOCBS, these came from pro-Russian hackers.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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