President's Office website becomes target of DDoS attacks

The website of the Slovak President's Office became the target of mass distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as of 5 p.m. on Sunday (January 20) and as of 11 a.m. on Tuesday (January 22). According to President Andrej Kiska's spokesman Roman Krpelan, hundreds of thousands and later even millions of foreign requests were targeted in order to knock out the www.prezident.sk site. Both attacks were dealt with, and the website was available again in a few minutes. A DDoS is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make an Internet service or application unavailable to its intended users. It is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being met.