2026-08-31 · view entry permalink →
Norway's shared national identity gateway ID-porten knocked out for 64 hours by the third escalating DDoS against Digdir since June
A distributed denial-of-service attack against Vivicta, the IT partner operating infrastructure for Norway's Digitalisation Agency (Digdir), disrupted ten government digital services from the early hours of Monday 24 August through roughly 19:30 on Wednesday 26 August 2026, about 64 hours, with intensity varying and short recovery windows in between (Digdir status page, 2026-08-28). The disrupted services include ID-porten, the shared identity gateway more than 4.5 million people use to log into government services via BankID and MinID, plus eFormidling, eSignering, Maskinporten and several other cross-agency data-exchange and access-management systems. Because ID-porten authenticates far beyond Digdir's own services, the disruption also affected parts of Norway's health infrastructure, several health services rely on ID-porten for authentication, and authorities warned of possible problems accessing online pharmacies and the electronic prescription system (The Record, 2026-08-25).
Digdir press officer Are Kvistad told Norwegian broadcaster NRK the attack was two to three times larger than the previous one, and it is the third DDoS incident to hit Digdir's infrastructure since June 2026 (The Record, 2026-08-25). Digdir states no sensitive data stored in the affected systems was accessed, and as of the incident's close, normal operation was expected to resume within days; some disruption from foreign traffic persisted afterward. No attribution has been made public, and it remains unclear whether the three 2026 incidents are connected or represent a broader campaign.
The attack started during the night of Monday at 03:38 and stopped around 19:30 Wednesday evening. Except for short periods, ID-porten and the shared solutions have been available the whole time.
What is special about this latest attack, which has now been ongoing for a day, is that it is two to three times larger than what we experienced last time