Prague, Oct 22 (CTK) – A hacker’s attack caused collapses of the Czech Statistical Office’s websites on Saturday after the general election ended, but it did not affect the transfer and processing of the election results, the CSU announced in a press release on Sunday.
The CSU will send its findings to the police and the National Office for Cyber and Information Security.
The volby.cz and the substitute website volbyhnetiond.cz, on which statisticians were releasing the election results, repeatedly collapsed during the counting of votes.
The external supplier originally told the CSU that the collapse was caused by technical problems. However, a detailed analysis revealed a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in which hackers were trying to overwhelm a website with a high number of demands sent at once from several computers.
“It was found out that a targeted DDos attack on the 02 company’s infrastructure used for the election occurred during the data processing on Saturday afternoon,” CSU spokeswoman Petra Bacova said.
Measures to halt the attack and secure the resumption of all services were taken then, she added.
“The attack in no way affected the infrastructure used for the transfer of the election results to the CSU and the independent processing of the data,” Bacova said.
