Cyber attack in Germany shuts down official sites

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Cyber attack in Germany shuts down official sites

Date January 8, 2015 - 2:33PM

German Chancellor Angela Merkel: At least three official German websites were inaccessible. Photo: Bloomberg

Berlin: At least three official German websites, including Chancellor Angela Merkel's page, were inaccessible after an apparent cyber attack.

A group demanding that Germany sever ties with Ukraine and halt financial and political support for the government in Kiev claimed responsibility for shutting down at least two sites, the chancellor's and the website of the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament.

A Foreign Ministry official later said that the ministry's site was also inaccessible.

The sites were at least periodically inaccessible after about 10am, according to Dr Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert. Seven hours later, a government spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the attack was still being analysed and no comment could be made on the identity of the attackers.

Mr Seibert earlier said "our service provider's data centre is under a severe attack that has apparently been caused by a variety of external systems".

In a Russian-language statement on its website, a group identifying itself as CyberBerkut – using the slogan "We Won't Forget. We Won't Forgive." – noted the support of Dr Merkel's government for Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

The statement said Mr Yatsenyuk was seeking more money from the West to prop up his country, which is faltering economically, as a way to allow what the group called Ukraine's "criminal government" to continue to wage war against pro-Russian forces, primarily in the eastern part of the country.

"Berkut" in the group's name is a reference to the special troops who supported Viktor Yanukovych, the former president who fled last February after weeks of anti-government unrest.

Last March, the CyberBerkut group claimed responsibility for taking down three NATO websites in a series of distributed denial of service attacks, in which servers are flooded with traffic until they collapse.

Meanwhile, in New York, FBI director James Comey said the United States had concluded that North Korea was behind the destructive attacks on Sony Pictures, partly because the hackers failed to mask their location when they broke into the company's servers. Mr Comey said that instead of routing some of the attacks and messages through decoy servers, the hackers sent them directly from internet addresses in North Korea.

While Mr Comey did not offer more details, senior government officials said FBI analysts found that the hackers quickly recognised their mistake. After logging into Sony's systems and websites like Facebook from North Korean addresses, the hackers quickly switched to software that camouflaged their whereabouts by sending their attacks through computers in countries including Bolivia, Singapore, Poland and Italy, the officials said.

Before the attacks in November, Sony Pictures was threatened in a series of messages posted to a Facebook account set up by a group calling itself "Guardians of Peace." After Facebook closed that account in November, the group changed its messaging platform and began sending threats in emails to Sony and on the anonymous posting site Pastebin. Their anger appeared to be directed at the Sony film The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Responding to critics who have questioned why the US thinks North Korea was the source of the attacks, Mr Comey said the hackers became "sloppy" as they tried to cover their tracks. He acknowledged that the North Koreans had used decoys but did not elaborate about the specific mistakes the hackers made that gave him "high confidence" the country was behind the attack.

New York Times