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Candidates on the CDU homepage: Livestream temporarily interrupted
Photo: Rüdiger Wölk / imago images / Rüdiger Wölk
According to General Secretary Paul Ziemiak, there were numerous hacker attacks, especially from abroad, at the digital party convention for the new CDU chairman's freestyle.
But these could be fended off, announced Ziemiak.
The attacks were "not funny," said the Secretary General.
"But we resisted." The party was prepared for such attacks.
The attacks were so-called DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service), in which attempts are made to bring the victim's server to its knees with massive requests.
The attackers apparently had the CDU homepage (www.cdu.de) in their sights.
As a precaution, the party had set up the delegates' digital workstations outside the CDU infrastructure, so that the attackers could not disrupt the course of the party congress.
Only the streaming of the party congress for the public could temporarily not be viewed on the CDU homepage.
The video signal ran in parallel but also live on YouTube and various TV stations.
Laschet: risk "handled excellently"
The attackers were also unable to reach the digital voting system.
It ran on servers of the provider Polyas, which were not publicly known.
The attack on the homepage was then pushed back according to party information in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom.
To do this, the technicians initially prevented access to Eastern Europe and Africa, where the attackers' servers were located.
Finally, certain IP addresses in Germany were also blocked, from which DDoS data packets were fired on the CDU server.
The election of the new chairman Armin Laschet was made digitally on Saturday, but now has to be confirmed in a postal vote.
In his closing remarks, Laschet said that one only had to imagine what would have happened if something had gone wrong technically, a vote had not worked or one of the hacker attacks had been successful.
"We would have been certain of the malice in the whole of Germany." With the new format, the CDU had taken "a great risk" - "but we managed this excellently."
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dab / dpa / AFP