The official website of Transportstyrelsen, Sweden’s Transport Agency (STA) came under a series of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on Thursday morning forcing it to go offline.
The attack on Transportstyrelsen came a day after the IT systems of Sweden’s Transport Administration (Trafikverket), which monitors railway traffic, was attacked by hackers leading to delays in trains schedule.
“I can confirm that in the morning we had something that was judging by a congestion attack,” Transport Agency Press Officer Mikael Andersson told Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
It is unclear who was behind the attacks or what were the motives of the attackers. However, this is the second time in the last four months that Sweden’s Transport Agency Transportstyrelsen is in the news for cyber attacks against its cyber infrastructure.
Patrik Gylesjö, deputy CEO of internet provider DGC told Computer Sweden “It could be a prank or someone trying to investigate what kind of protection Trafikverket has.”
In a successful DDoS attack, online service is forced to go down by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.
In July this year, it was reported that a massive trove of data belonging to Transportstyrelsen was mistakenly uploaded to a cloud server. The data contained vehicle and personal information of almost every citizen in the country including the military and police officials.
Although the investigation is still in process, initial checks discovered that the exposed data includes names, addresses, and pictures of millions of citizens, details about people listed in police registers and government military vehicles, driver’s license records of fighter pilots of the Swedish air force, personal details of military members in secret units and data on critical infrastructure in Sweden including roads and bridges.
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