Prague/Zlin, South Moravia, April 26 (CTK) – The website of the Czech Social Democratic Party (senior ruling CSSD) yesterday faced a hacking attack and was temporarily inaccessible due to it, CSSD spokesman Michal Kacirek said.
“It has turned out that our website is to a great extent resistant even to such massive attacks,” the party’s leader, Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, told CTK.
Sobotka said the CSSD reported the incident to the police and the National Security Office.
Kacirek said the attack seemed directed and organised.
The hackers first unsuccessfully attempted to change the contents of the website and then to overwhelm it with traffic, he said, referring to distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks. In reaction, the CSSD technicians temporarily switched off the website for security reasons and tried to localise the hackers, Kacirek said.
Karel Miko, an expert on cyber security, said the attack yesterday was far less sophisticated than the recent hacking of Sobotka’s e-mails.
Miko said websites of political parties are a relatively easy target for such attacks since they are not ready to deal with extreme traffic. Unlike banks, the attacks do not threaten any business of a political party and they only have a media impact, he said.
An extremist website released correspondence from Sobotka’s private e-mail account in January. Last December, hackers got shortly under control the prime minister’s Twitter account.
