Unknown event in Switzerland on Wed 17th January 2024

Switzerland said Wednesday that a cyberattack claimed by a pro-Russian group temporarily disrupted access to a number of government websites, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Davos. The government said that “the Russian-linked hacker group ‘NoName‘ claimed responsibility for the attack, citing Ukrainian President Zelensky’s attendance at the WEF annual meeting” in the luxury Swiss ski resort of Davos. In a statement, the government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) stressed that “the cyber-attack was promptly detected” and specialists “took the necessary action to restore access to the websites as quickly as possible”. “An attack of this kind had been expected, and appropriate security measures were in place.” The so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), which makes websites or network resources unavailable by flooding them with malicious traffic, temporarily knocked out access to government ministries and federal offices. But the government’s main portal www.admin.ch remained operational, the statement said. The “NoName” group which claimed Wednesday’s attack already targeted Switzerland’s federal administration last June, after Zelensky addressed the Swiss parliament remotely via video-link. This time, the Ukrainian president came to Switzerland in person.