Prague city government servers attacked by Russian hackers

The Prague city government website was down on Thursday due to a targeted attack by a Russian hacker group, the Czech News Agency reports. Jiří Károly, director of one of the municipality's IT departments, said that the attack was due to Czechia's support for Ukraine.

The cyber-attack has been linked to a Russian IP address, but the specific hacking group behind the attack is not yet known. The matter is still being investigated. According to the information available so far, it was the type of cyber-attack known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which involves overloading the target servers with a large number of queries.

The number of cyber-attacks by Russian hackers in Czechia has increased since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year. Current president Petr Pavel's website was attacked by hackers in the run-up to the presidential elections, and the Foreign Ministry and the Prague city transport company's website have also had to deal with cyber-attacks in recent months.