Russian hackers’ attack on large Belgian websites
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A Russian hackers collective has again succeeded in laying various large Belgian websites (temporarily) flat. Government portal Mygov.be, among others, cannot be reached. The website of the Walloon Parliament was also offline for a while.
Government portal Mygov.be where citizens can gain access to official documents is not available. That was a while for the websites of the Walloon Parliament and the Parliament of the French Community.
The pro-Russian hackers collective Noname057 is behind the attack. On their telegram channel it sounds that it is a result of a new support package worth 1 billion euros from our country to Ukraine. Defense minister Theo Francken (N-VA) offered that package at the beginning of March during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zensky.
It is a relatively harmless DDOS attack. The servers are « bombed » with requests, which makes them overload and becoming unreachable for real users. Hackers, however, cannot steal data in this way, which also underlines the Center for Cyber Security Belgium.
In October last year – a few days before the municipal elections – the hackers visited Belgian government websites five days in a row. At the time it was mainly about the websites of small municipalities. Now the hackers focus on larger targets. Cyber security company Falconfeeds.io speaks about mygov.be, but also the website of the Walloon Parliament and some Brussels government sites. However, most of those sites seem to function again. It is possible that the attack flares again during the day.
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