The cities of Geneva and Sierre affected by the Russian cyberattack

(Keystone-ATS) At the end of the morning, the problem was in the process of being resolved, the City of Geneva added to Keystone-ATS. There was no data theft.

The City of Sierre has also confirmed that it is “the indirect victim” of a cyberattack targeting the company which hosts its site. The problem lies with the accessibility of the site and not with its content which has not suffered any data loss. “We are letting our site host resolve the problem,” the City of Sierre further clarified to Keystone-ATS.

Also affected on Wednesday morning, the canton of Schaffhausen indicated at the end of the morning that its site was once again accessible.

Distributed denial of service

These cyberattacks echo other actions carried out by Russian hackers on Tuesday against the websites of several Swiss municipalities and banks. These attacks are carried out by distributed denial of service (DDoS). They consist of paralyzing websites and applications by overloading them with targeted requests.

According to the Federal Office for Cybersecurity (OFCS), the attacks were claimed by the Russian hacker group “NoName”. DDoS attacks cannot steal data. Hackers who launch such attacks are primarily interested in attracting attention.

On Tuesday, the websites of various organizations were overloaded, in particular the sites of the cantonal banks of Zurich and Vaud and of several Lucerne municipalities. These cyberattacks come while the World Economic Forum (WEF) is being held in Davos.