The Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) under Nancy Faeser (SPD) has apparently fallen victim to a massive cyber attack. According to the “Bild” (Wednesday edition), the highly secure internet site of the ministry was not accessible for more than two hours on the previous Saturday. After a failed attempt, the user was informed: “Service unavailable”. A spokesperson confirmed the outage and the attack to the newspaper, which occurred around 12:30 to 14:30 hours. “The analysis by the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZ) has shown that the cause of the temporary unavailability of the BMI website was a DDOS attack” the spokesperson said.
As to the background of the attack, no statement can be made yet. The abbreviation DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In a DDOS attack, a server is intentionally bombarded with so many requests that it can no longer handle the volume of requests and collapses.