The attack was a DDoS attack, in which hackers try to overburden a website by a large number of simultaneous requests for access. Photo credit: Freepik.
Prague, April 28 (CTK) – A Russian hacker group attacked the servers of Prague City Hall yesterday because of the city’s support for Ukraine, the director of the City Hall IT section Jiri Karoly said at a meeting of city councillors.
Due to the attack, Prague’s website was offline, as well as the online broadcast of yesterday’s council meeting.
Karoly said around 4pm that the available analysis showed that all systems were functional.
Based on the available information from the City Hall, it was a DDoS attack, in which hackers try to overburden a website by a large number of simultaneous requests for access.
Karoly said the IP address was in Russia, and Russian hackers had already taken responsibility for the attack.
“We are currently trying to establish which hacker group was behind it specifically, and we are analysing the method of the attack,” he said, adding that it would probably take some time to deal with the consequences of the attack.
Katoly told the councillors that the first attack happened between 9:45am and 11:45am, and another followed just before 2pm. So far, it seems that all systems are working again, he added.
City Hall spokesman Vit Hofman said the attack caused an outage between the city hall’s internal network, which is still functional, and the internet.
“Currently, only communication within the office is working and no external services, registers or the web are available. To our knowledge, there has been no data leakage, thanks to our protection systems,” he added.
The number of attacks by Russian hackers in the Czech Republic has increased since Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022. Before the presidential election in January, the hackers attacked the websites of then-candidate Petr Pavel, who subsequently became president, the Foreign Ministry, and other websites. Recently, the website of Prague’s Public Transport Company has also faced a DDoS attack.
