Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

Swiss federal administration hit by hacker attack

Federal administration affected 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.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

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.

+ Explainer: how vulnerable is Switzerland to cyber-attacks?

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

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

Most Read
Swiss Abroad

Most Discussed

News

Swiss films have a chance in the competition at the 75th Berlinale

More

Swiss film in competition at the 75th Berlinale has a shot at Golden Bear

This content was published on The comedy "La Cache" by Lausanne screenwriter and director Lionel Blaiser has a chance of winning the Silver or Golden Bear at the 75th Berlinale. This was announced by the organizers at a media conference on Tuesday morning.

Read more: Swiss film in competition at the 75th Berlinale has a shot at Golden Bear

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR