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Shortly before Lothar Wieler at a press conference on October 22nd.
talked about increased numbers of infections, the RKI website was offline
Photo: Markus Schreiber / dpa
Instead of up-to-date information about the corona pandemic, visitors to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) website only saw a white screen with an error message on the morning of October 22nd.
The site was offline for around two hours due to a cyber attack.
This was confirmed by the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund) on request from SPIEGEL.
Like other federal digital services, the Robert Koch Institute's website is operated via the servers of the IT service provider ITZBund.
According to previous knowledge, the website www.rki.de went offline due to a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service).
This is an attack that floods a page with a large number of artificially generated views, causing it to collapse under the load of traffic.
According to a spokesman for the ITZBund, the attack was intensified with the help of so-called botnets.
In cybercrime, botnets are a widespread means of sending massive amounts of data via hijacked devices and computers connected to the network.
So attacks can be carried out on a large scale.
According to the ITZBund, who is behind the attack is not yet known and is still being investigated.
No data leakage
The RKI website was temporarily unavailable on October 22nd from around 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and shortly after 12 p.m.
The so-called dashboard, in which current figures on pandemic events are collected and displayed, was not affected by the attack, as it is hosted on a different website.
Functions of the Corona warning app were also not affected by the attack.
According to the ITZBund, data did not flow out and there was no damage to the infrastructure.
"The attack was fended off by a targeted 'tightening' of the security mechanisms for the website," said a spokesman.
On October 22nd, additional protective measures were taken to prevent the RKI website from failing as a result of similar attacks in the future.
Due to the corona pandemic, the site is under special observation anyway, according to the ITZBund.
"There are currently no indications that the website could get into an overload situation that we could not control," said a spokesman.
The site's server capacities are generally adequately dimensioned and could also be increased at short notice.
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