Deutsche Bahn suspects Russian meddling behind recent IT outage
A recent major outage at Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-owned railway company, has been linked to a large-scale botnet attack.
Photo by Ying Tang via Getty Images.
A recent major outage at Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-owned railway company, has been linked to a large-scale botnet attack.
Deutsche Bahn recently revealed the cause of last Tuesday’s IT outage. According to local media reports, many users faced issues accessing the company’s services after Deutsche Bahn’s DB Navigator app and the railway’s website, bahn.de, were unavailable.
Deutsche Bahn is Germany’s second-largest transport company with over €50 billion ($59 billion) in revenue, and a workforce exceeding 338,000.
Information obtained by Der Spiegel, a major German media outlet, indicates that the national railway company suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. According to Deutsche Bahn’s statement, shared with Der Spiegel, the attack is still ongoing, with the company managing its fallout.
“Following a DDoS attack yesterday at noon against Deutsche Bahn's IT systems, bahn.de and DB Navigator are currently available to all passengers again. Our defensive measures were effective in minimizing the impact on our customers,” the company said in a statement.
While the official company statement does not indicate who may have been behind the attack, Der Spiegel sources indicate that German authorities suspect Russian attackers are to blame.
If confirmed, it would hardly be the first time that Moscow-aligned threat actors have targeted Germany’s national railways. For example, in 2023, attacker collective NoName057 launched a persistent DDoS attack against the company, impacting its customer-facing IT infrastructure.
We have reached out to Deutsche Bahn for comment and will update this article once we receive a reply.
DDoS attacks typically involve thousands, if not millions, of infected computers that send queries to the target network, eventually overwhelming it and causing disruptions. While hardly innovative, DDoS attacks can still cause serious issues.
In 2023, the Anonymous Sudan group taunted SAS Airlines with DDoS attacks for days. At one point, the attackers demanded that the company pay $3 million to end the crippling bot onslaught.
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