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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