National Council elections – hacker attacks on parties: Russians behind it?

This time, federal and state organizations of the ÖVP and NEOS were affected, as the parties confirmed on request on Sunday. About half of NEOS sites were offline. DDoS attacks cause outages due to network overload, but otherwise do not cause any damage.

Just a few days ago there were DDoS attacks on ministries and public institutions such as the Ministry of Defense and the Court of Audit. Parties and some state sites were also affected on Sunday, it was said on Sunday when asked.

“Attempt to weaken our democracy”
The Ministry of the Interior has been recording attacks on the websites of ministries, administrative authorities, energy suppliers, public transport systems and political parties in Austria since mid-September. A connection with pro-Russian groups, which have been attacking websites of Western countries with DDoS attacks every day since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, is obvious. Due to the DDoS protection measures on many of the websites, the attacks only led to isolated failures, according to the ministry.

The conduct of the National Council elections, which are taking place in an analogous manner in Austria, is not threatened by the cyber attacks, as the Ministry of the Interior has recently emphasized several times. In any case, the responsible organizational units of the department – including the NCSZ, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and GovCERT – are involved.

In a broadcast, the Tyrolean ÖVP identified an attempt to “weaken our democracy. If the People’s Party is thwarted in the final meters, it will only help the FPÖ and Herbert Kickl.” All parties must condemn the cyber attacks.