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Wednesday, January 7, 2015

German Government Websites Shut Down, and Ukraine Group Claims Responsibility

At least three official German websites, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s page, were inaccessible on Wednesday after an apparent cyberattack.
A group demanding that Germany sever ties with Ukraine and halt financial and political support for the government in the capital, Kiev, claimed credit for shutting down at least two sites, the chancellor’s page and the website of the Bundestag, or lower house of Parliament.
A Foreign Ministry official later said that the ministry’s site was also inaccessible.
The sites were at least periodically inaccessible after about 10 a.m., according to Ms. Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert. Seven hours later, a government spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity said that the attack was still being analyzed and that no comment could be made on the identity of the attackers.
Mr. Seibert earlier told reporters at a regular government news conference that “our service provider’s data center is under a severe attack that has apparently been caused by a variety of external systems.”
In a Russian-language statement posted on its website, a group identifying itself as CyberBerkut — using the slogan “We Won’t Forget. We Won’t Forgive.” — noted the support of Ms. Merkel’s government for Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk.
The statement said the prime minister was seeking more money from the West to prop up his country, which is faltering economically, as a way to allow what the group called Ukraine’s “criminal government” to continue to wage war against pro-Russian forces, primarily in the eastern part of the country.
“Berkut” in the group’s name is a reference to the special troops who supported Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president who fled last February after weeks of antigovernment unrest.
Last March, the CyberBerkut group claimed responsibility for taking down three NATO websites in a series of distributed denial of service attacks, in which servers are flooded with traffic until they collapse.

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