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Hackers are attacking Belgian government websites, making them difficult or impossible to access. The attack is likely a response to our country’s promise to supply Ukraine with F16s.
Hackers are attacking Belgian government websites, making them difficult or impossible to access. The attack is likely a response to our country’s promise to supply Ukraine with F16s.
Since yesterday evening, several government websites have been hit by a cyberattack. Among other things, the locations of the Prime Minister, the Palace, the Chamber and the Senate were targeted. Several websites such as those of the House of Representatives are already back online, but others such as those of the Senate and the Royal House are currently still inaccessible.
Attackers use a so-called Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which a website’s capacity is overwhelmed by malicious connection requests. By sending a tsunami of such requests to websites, it creates a digital traffic jam that even legitimate traffic can’t get through. Imagine you want to drive to the palace, but a villain has unleashed ten thousand extra cars on the Brussels ring road and the city center.
The criminals manage to make the sites inaccessible, but they have not been hacked. So there is no security problem and no data was stolen. The attackers are persistent: when one technique is defused, they switch to another. Miguel De Bruycker from the Center for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) describes the attack on the VRT websites as “bullying behavior”.
The CCB was able to intercept a list of targets and found that everything pointed to Russian hackers. Belgium recently said it would send its old F16s to Ukraine by 2025. Such expressions of support are often the cause of digital retaliatory attacks that can last for several days. At the time of writing, we note that the attack is indeed still ongoing, having begun last night.
Strangely, yesterday there was an English message on the homepages of the affected website: “We are coming to Belgium to destroy the Russia-hating websites.” Such a message is not consistent with a DDoS attack, as it only affects accessibility and not affects the content of a target. The message has since disappeared, but it appears that the hackers had more influence and access, at least for a short time.
Source: IT Daily
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