DDoS Attack Disrupts Norway's Government Digital Services

Since Monday, Norway's shared government digital infrastructure has been enduring a major DDoS attack. According to Bleeping Computer, the attack began at 03:38 Central European Time and targeted the systems that serve the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency (Digitaliseringsdirektoratet, Digdir) and its operations partner Vivicta.

Digdir is responsible for an entire layer of public services: logging in to government systems, electronic ID cards and signatures, secure digital mail, government forms, access to public registries and data exchange between agencies. According to the agency, a number of services were completely unavailable for short periods.

What's Down

So far, most systems have been stabilized, but some services — in particular the ID-porten login system and the eSignering electronic signature platform — are still only partially available. Users may encounter connection errors, slow server responses and unusually long login times.

The effects of the attack are also being felt by services that were not themselves the target but depend on Digdir's infrastructure. Altinn, the central platform for interaction between citizens, businesses and the government, warned of problems with login and operation, while the tax authority Skatteetaten posted a similar notice and asked users to try again later.

Who's to Blame

Digdir director Frode Danielsen stresses that the investigation has found no signs of the organization's systems being breached or personal data being compromised. According to him, this is already the third DDoS attack on Digdir in a short span of time: the previous ones occurred in June and on August 3.

Norway's National Security Authority (NSM) and the Data Protection Authority (Datatilsynet) have been notified of the incident. There is no official attribution yet, though Norwegian media are speculating about possible Russian involvement.

The current status of the services can be tracked on their status page, as well as in the incident report maintained by the Norwegian digitalisation agency.

Source: Bleeping Computer