IT outage in the Bundestag: Great nervousness during Ukraine negotiations
The German Bundestag experienced a significant IT outage, with network, email, and shared drives affected. Cause remains unclear.
(Image: In Green/Shutterstock.com)
From 2:30 PM on Monday afternoon, nothing worked in the German Bundestag for a while – the network, email, shared drives, and printers were offline. A spokesperson confirmed this to heise online upon request.
Parallel to the ceasefire negotiations taking place a few meters away in the Federal Chancellery with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, a targeted attack on the Bundestag's IT? And this, after just last Friday the Federal Foreign Office had summoned the Russian ambassador – summoned the Russian ambassador – due to disinformation and IT security incidents, which the federal intelligence services clearly attribute to Russian actors? Could it be a show of force, perhaps by the unit known as Fancy Bear, also identified as Advanced Persistent Threat 28 (APT28) of the Russian military intelligence service GRU? Which is said to have already caused trouble in the Bundestag network in the past?
Systems are running again; cause of outage unclear
In any case, there was considerable excitement among MPs, staff, and the media on Monday afternoon. The networks only came back online after several hours. What exactly happened is not yet clear, emphasizes a spokesperson for the Bundestag administration. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) was "routinely" called in, which was not always the case in the past, as the BSI, as an executive authority, is actually not responsible for the legislative branch, the parliament. In the early evening, according to the spokesperson, the systems were gradually put back into operation. He stressed: "The cause of the disruption is currently still open." However, the quick restoration of service argues against the suspicion that they could be sustainably compromised.
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The Bundestag is repeatedly the target of attacks. The parliament has several IT infrastructures, some of which are partially independent of each other. The methods range from manipulated USB sticks and widespread attacks on office products to targeted spearphishing against individual actors. The Bundestag itself operates a network for the workstations and printers of MPs and staff, as well as the parliamentary administration. The Bundestag groups, in turn, use partly their own IT infrastructure. In addition, there is a WLAN in the Bundestag, which is largely separated from the rest of the networks – and is also said not to have been affected by today's outage.
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