A number of Government websites were targeted yesterday evening in a cyberattack, ahead of votes being counted in the local and EU elections today.
One of the sites that was targeted in Ireland was the online voter registration site, voter.ie, but National Cyber Security Centre officials say that the impact has been minimal.
These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aim to overwhelm a website’s host server with traffic, in an attempt to have the site crash and therefore be unavailable to be accessed.
It’s understood that Government sites for the Houses of the Oireachtas, Bus Éireann, Irish Rail, Transport for Ireland, and the Leap Card were also targeted, but again with minimal impact.
These attacks are similar to ones that occurred in other EU member states as well in recent times.
