German railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) became the target of a DDoS cyberattack this week, which led to disruptions in its information and booking systems on Tuesday and Wednesday. Countermeasures were effective in minimising impact, says DB.
The IT disruptions began on Tuesday afternoon and affected both the railway DB Navigator and the bahn.de website. Customers can normally use both platforms to request travel information and book tickets, among other things. The attack was specifically targeted at DB and has occurred in waves, said the railway company. It is unclear who is behind the attack and their motivation.
After the systems had been running ‘largely stable’ on Tuesday evening, on Wednesday DB said the company was still experiencing the cyberattack, but that countermeasures were effective in minimising the impact. The company called the scale of the attack ‘considerable’.
DB was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a malicious attempt to overload a website or network by flooding it with traffic with the aim of degrading its performance or even making it completely inaccessible.
