The European Parliament has had its website temporarily taken down due to a DDoS attack carried out just hours after it said Russia supports terrorism.
Wednesday 23 November was particularly eventful for the European Parliament. A few hours after a scathing communication against Russia, the institution’s website was the victim of a denial of service (DDoS) attack, which prompted the Parliament’s IT service to temporarily take it offline . The pro-Russian group Killnet claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.
A DDoS attack claimed by a group of pro-Russian hackers
The head of communication and spokesperson for the European Parliament, James Dauch, quickly confirmed that the breakdown of the website of the parliamentary body located in Strasbourg had a malicious origin, specifying that he had identified ” high levels of external network traffic “.
This intense traffic was neither more nor less linked to a DDoS attack. These attacks consist in launching, thanks to a very large number of points (computers, connected objects, etc.), requests on the site of the infrastructure, company or organization targeted, thus drowning out the legitimate requests which, they can no longer succeed. In other words, a DDoS attack consists of slowing down (or even bringing down) a website, thanks to a number of requests that are too difficult to support.
The pro-Russian hackers of Anonymous Russia (a group affiliated with the Killnet collective, as we said) succeeded in their attempt, pushing the teams of the European Parliament to ” solve this problem as soon as possible “. All the same, it took about 5 hours to restore correct access to the Parliament site. ” The DDoS attack is contained “, wrote Jaume Duch on Twitter Wednesday shortly before 9 p.m.
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” A pro-Russian group claimed responsibility (…) this after we proclaimed Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism confirmed the President of Parliament, Roberta Metsola, before adding: my answer: “Slava Ukraini” or “Glory to Ukraine”.
The attack actually came shortly after Parliament passed a resolution on the latest developments in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Through this text, Strasbourg declares that the Kremlin is committing war crimes and that the country led by Vladimir Putin has recourse to ” means of terrorism “.
With this resolution, Parliament calls on the European Union and the international community to unleash new restrictive measures against Russia, calling on it to be isolated from the rest of the world and to further reduce diplomatic ties with Moscow.
Sources: Clubic, European Parliament, Bleeping Computer
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