Russia’s secret services were behind an attack on a Polish government website that forced it to shut down, Government Plenipotentiary for Cyber Security at the Prime Minister’s Office Janusz Cieszyński reported.

Russian hackers target U.S. nuclear scientists: report

A Russian hacking team known as Cold River targeted three nuclear research laboratories in the United States this past summer, Reuters reported,…

see more

On Tuesday, the tax.gov.pl website (containing information about taxes) went down. At that time the Finance Ministry told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that the website’s downtime was not the result of a hacker attack, but was caused by a technical error.

However, on Wednesday, the government plenipotentiary for cyber security said that the shutdown was caused by Russian secret services.

“The Russians were responsible for yesterday’s attack. We have information that makes it very likely that it was them,” he told a private broadcaster Polsat News.

Cieszyński explained that the attack involved generating a lot of artificial traffic on the website, adding that no data was stolen.