Just a day after the European Parliament passed a resolution that accused Russia of supporting state-sponsored terrorism, the parliament’s website went down due to a DDoS attack. Pro-Russian group Killnet has claimed responsibility for the attack in a rather obscene Telegram post.
European Parliament President Roberta Metsola tweeted the news shortly after stating that the website was under a ‘sophisticated’ cyberattack. What exactly was ‘sophisticated’ about this attack remains to be seen as the authorities are yet to release any information on the matter. The same tweet from Metsola did also claim that their IT experts are pushing back against the attack and protecting systems from any further compromises.
The attack did make several parts of the website almost unusable. It is, however, back online and fully accessible at the time of writing, as confirmed by Jaume Duch, spokesperson for the European Parliament, who also stated that the attack had been successfully contained.
This attack seems to be a Russian response to the aforementioned resolution passed by the European Parliament to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism on Wednesday. The vote comes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and after military strikes on civilian targets, including critical infrastructure, hospitals, schools and shelters, violated international law.
While these attacks don’t cause much damage, they make a statement about the attacker’s technical infrastructure and capabilities. Killnet itself can very likely be the source of the attack as the group has been known to target government websites with similar DDoS attacks, including a recent attempt to take down US government websites earlier this month, including the US Treasury Department.
The attack, however, was thwarted before it could cause any operational impact on the agency. The next day, Killnet claimed to have released a bot army to DDoS JPMorgan Chase but didn’t see much success there either.
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