A good week after a possible cyber attack, many chambers of industry and commerce (IHK) in Germany are still digitally paralysed. The chamber responsible for Mainfranken in Würzburg got off lightly, but there are also restrictions there.
As spokesman Radu Ferendino said on Friday, the website is still usable. It’s on other servers. As reported, many chambers in Germany are attached to the Gesellschaft für Informationsverarbeitung in Dortmund, which works for the umbrella organization, the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK), and has shut down a number of IHK websites because of the attack.
How the IHK Würzburg-Schweinfurt can currently be reached
The DIHK has been announcing for days that “after intensive tests, it will gradually put the IT systems back online”. The IHK Würzburg-Schweinfurt can still be reached by phone or fax, but not by e-mail, said spokesman Ferendino. He did not say what other impairments there are in the day-to-day business of his chamber, with a view to the ongoing investigations.
In order to fill gaps in the offer, the DIHK on his website for companies, among other things, important sample forms for all aspects of training are available for download. Also there is an overview of the central telephone numbers of all 79 IHKs in Germany.
Aschaffenburg and other chambers: Nothing works anymore
While the websites of the IHK Würzburg-Schweinfurt have been usable almost without restrictions in the past few days, other chambers have remained unplugged. On Friday, for example, in Mainfranken’s IHK neighborhood, including Heilbronn, Aschaffenburg and Bayreuth, there was only one upstream page with the note “Service currently not available”.
The chamber in Fulda, on the other hand, could no longer be found digitally on Friday, and an error message appeared. The Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Middle Franconia in Nuremberg showed a self-created front page with various information about the “technical fault”.
Prosecutors are now investigating
Meanwhile, the public prosecutor’s office in North Rhine-Westphalia has started investigations into data sabotage, said a spokesman for the central and contact point for cybercrime, according to dpa. The investigation is still in its infancy and is aimed at unknown persons.
In the past few days, IT specialist media have speculated that the attack on the IHK structure was a so-called DDoS attack, what kind of Distributed-Denial-of-Service stands. Here, criminals try to bring servers to their knees through mass access to certain websites – often combined with ransom demands. So far there has been no confirmation as to whether such an attack was involved in the case of the IHKs.
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