Pavel Burian posts - Czech Points

Pavel Burian

May 11, 2018 Politics

Election hack remains a mystery! Police stumped, give up investigation!

Election hack remains a mystery! Police stumped, give up investigation! - Czech Points

Czech police have not found the perpetrators of the hacker’s attack on the Czech Statistical Office’s (CSU) websites last autumn and shelved the case, the iROZHLAS.cz server reported today, referring to the police and state attorney’s office.

Hackers caused the collapse of the websites on which the CSU were releasing the results of the last October general election. However, the CSU claims it didn’t affect the results.

State attorney Richard Houdek, who supervised the investigation into the hackers’ attack, confirmed to the server again that it had been a targetted attack.

“However, the originator was neither found nor localised,” he added.

This is why the police shelved the case at the end of January.

Volby.cz and backup site volbyhned.cz, which posted election results in real time was taken down multiple times by DDOS attacks durning the vote tally. 

The external supplier originally told the CSU that the collapse was caused by technical problems. However, a detailed analysis revealed a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in which hackers were trying to overwhelm a website with a high number of demands sent at once from several computers.

CSU spokeswoman Petra Bacova announced shortly after the attack that it had in no way affected the infrastructure used for the transfer of the election results to the CSU and the independent processing of the data.

In reaction to this, the CSU took security measures to prevent a similar situation in the future and it carried out security and load tests of its websites.