Selected government sites affected by confirmed cyber attack

Early reports suggested the State's IT systems could have fallen victim to a cyber attack, a fact which was later confirmed by the High Commission for National Protection.

According to RTL sources, MPs received an email on Thursday afternoon advising of issues with the technical services belonging to the Chamber of Deputies, also affecting IT systems. The email said these could have been caused by a cyber attack affecting parliament and the government systems.

The HCPN later issued a statement confirming the attack and described it as a DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack which had flooded the State's servers, rendering them unusable.

A number of websites run by the State were unavailable for some time, including gouvernement.lu and MyGuichet.lu services, but were fixed within a couple of hours.

A team from the government's information and technology centre was said to be urgently working to fix the problem.

Prime Minister Luc Frieden, currently in attendance at an EU summit in Brussels, has convened a crisis unit to discuss further steps, overseen by digitisation minister Stéphanie Obertin.

In the HCPN press release, it was confirmed that the Prime Minister would be kept informed of any progress. The High Commission declined to supply details on the provenance of the attack.

A post currently circulating on social networks Telegram and X claims that the attack is due to Luxembourg's involvement in the purchase of ammunition for Ukraine.

The message reads:

"Russian hackers have united and are going to punish the Russophobic authorities of Luxembourg. This dwarf state, despite its, to put it mildly, modest size, decided, like its neighbours in the EU, to dance to the tune of the West and became involved in the Czech initiative to purchase shells for Bandera's supporters."

The alleged hackers go on to say they are punishing Luxembourg for supporting "Zelensky's terrorists".