Thought Leadership
The hours-long IT outage of the Swiss Federal Administration on January 10 had political reasons: Cyber criminals attacked the systems in response to the new ban on veiling.
The Swiss Federal Administration experienced a major system failure on January 10. Telephony, email services, websites and specialist applications were down for several hours. As the recently published situation report by the Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) now reveals, this was due to a politically motivated protest against the burqa ban.
Coordinated overload attack
The attack was a classic DDoS operation: the attackers bombarded the federal servers with an enormous number of simultaneous requests, bringing the infrastructure to a standstill. The timing was no coincidence – the ban on veiling had only come into force nine days earlier, on January 1, after the Swiss population had approved the corresponding popular initiative in March 2021.
According to federal information, it was a pure availability attack without any data outflow. The attackers’ motivation was apparently purely demonstrative.
Major political events as a trigger for attacks
The Federal Office for Cybersecurity (BACS) confirms a direct link between political developments and the cyber threat situation. In addition to decisions such as the ban on burqas, international events are also regular triggers for attacks – such as the Davos WEF in January, the Bürgenstock Peace Conference for Ukraine in June 2024 and the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel.
Availability attacks of this kind primarily serve to generate attention for political messages, explains the BACS. In order not to offer the attackers an additional platform, the authority communicates only cautiously about the motivation and origin of the hacktivists.
