Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

Swiss government websites hit by cyberattacks ahead of Ukraine summit 

The Burgenstock resort, perched on the top of a tree-covered mountain. Lake Lucerne can be seen behind in the distance. The building is approximately six storeys, and white.
The Ukraine peace summit is taking place at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland this weekend. Keystone / Urs Flueeler

Various Swiss government websites and organisations involved in the Ukraine peace summit were the target of cyberattacks on Thursday morning, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). 

Switzerland’s NCSC said the attacks were presumably related to the conference, which is taking place at the country’s Bürgenstock resort this weekend. Further such attacks are expected in the run-up to and during the event. 

Check out our selection of newsletters. Subscribe here.

While the attacks led to minor outages, the NCSC said, these were within a specified tolerance range and operations of the affected organisations were not significantly impacted. It added that there is currently no acute threat.

Swiss customs was among those affected, the government announced, which had to temporarily switch to alternative emergency procedures for customs declarations. After just over an hour, systems were back to normal. 

More

The security of data and systems was not jeopardised at any time, according to the NCSC, which added that hackers launch disruptive cyberattacks to spread their political message and gain attention. 

Overload attacks, or Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, aim to overload websites and computer systems with large numbers of requests. The data volume often reaches several hundred gigabits per second, volumes that a single organisation usually cannot handle without outside help. 

Adapted from German by DeepL/kp/jdp

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Daily news

Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox.

Daily

The SBC Privacy Policy provides additional information on how your data is processed.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR