Luxembourg’s parliament has taken its website offline to address a “confirmed risk”, it said on Wednesday evening.
“The Chamber of Deputies is required to isolate all IT systems (websites, email, etc.) from the internet,” parliament said in a short statement issued on Wednesday evening. The measure was scheduled to begin at 18:30 on Wednesday and “will remain in place until at least” 08:00 on Thursday.
“This is a precautionary measure aimed at addressing a confirmed risk, which our teams are currently investigating,” the parliament statement added.
Although parliament did not explain what the “confirmed risk” refers to, nor what the isolation of all IT systems means, such a move usually involves halting communications between internal and external networks as an attempt to prevent intrusions including cyberattacks, data breaches and malware infections.
While parliament has not confirmed any such attack, there have been a series of cyberattacks against Luxembourg companies and state institutions over the past year.
Malware limits access to Luxembourg government’s internal services
At the end of February, the Ministry of Digitalisation revealed that malware was detected on the system for the mobile devices managed by the State Centre for Information Technology (CTIE). A statement said that the CTIE proactively isolated the system as soon as the malware was detected.
Earlier in February, hackers managed to obtain the data of 27,000 employees of Luxembourg-based media company RTL Group.
In January, the ‘public.lu’ domain, home to key state services such as Guichet.lu and the CNS health insurer, was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Services were only unavailable for around 40 minutes, and no sensitive data was disclosed or leaked.
Last summer, the Post’s internet and mobile services suffered a near-total breakdown for roughly four hours, leaving thousands of users unable to phone 112.
