Swedish intelligence agency hit by IT-attack

A cyber attack knocked out the website of a Swedish intelligence agency on Monday, just days after several Swedish media outlets and the police were hit by similar attacks.

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The National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets radioanstalt – FRA) was bombarded with email sent from a large number of computers in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.

“It started on Monday afternoon. When we noticed the attack we shut down the site ourselves. Since then we’ve had technicians working to clean out the system so we could start to use the site again on Tuesday,” said FRA spokesperson Anni Bölenius to the TT news agency.

Nevertheless, FRA’s home page continued to be plagued by disturbances well into Tuesday night.

Bölenius emphasized that agency’s signals intelligence operations weren’t compromised by the attack.

“An intrusion is basically impossible to carry out against us. This doesn’t impact our operations,” she said.

While FRA’s primary mission is to help other government agencies avoid cyber attacks, Bölenius denied that the attack against FRA constituted an embarrassment for the agency.

“No, it’s not the least bit embarrassing. DoS attacks are almost impossible to defend against,” she told TT.

The agency’s chief spokesperson warned that such attacks are happening with increasing frequency.

“Lately we’ve seen this type of IT attack increase and there are many who’ve been affected. It’s hard to defend oneself against attacks of this sort which involve overwhelming a website,” said FRA head spokesperson Jan Donnér in a statement.