Access to the BSI website disrupted
The website of the Federal Office for Information Security was temporarily inaccessible. The cause is still unclear.
(Image: dpa, Oliver Berg)
The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has confirmed that there were problems with the website www.bsi.bund.de. There were hacking problems when accessing the site, most of which could not be opened at all until early afternoon on Wednesday. However, the authority did not provide any further information.
Website malfunction: Remedy in progress
At the request of heise online, a BSI spokesperson said: "The BSI is aware of the problem. The responsible hoster has been informed and is working on solving the problem. There are currently no indications of a possible DDoS attack." The website should be available again shortly as usual; in our tests at the time of reporting, access worked normally again - this was only not the case around an hour earlier.
Videos by heise
In the past, government websites have often been the target of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks). In these attacks, the attackers flood the servers with so many requests that, on the one hand, the bandwidth of the internet connection of the affected servers is overloaded and the resources of the servers are completely used up so that they can no longer respond to regular requests.
In April last year, for example, there were such attacks on several official bodies in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which were then no longer accessible on the internet. At the same time, there were attacks on the state portal of Saxony-Anhalt. The Ministry of the Interior of Lower Saxony had also declared that several police websites were no longer accessible due to "load attacks on the servers". In the current case of the BSI website, however, it is still unclear what caused the disruption, which had been ongoing for some time.
(dmk)
