Dutch government websites struggling with cyberattacks possibly from Russian hackers
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Loading... - Guerrero Cesar
- 12 May 2023
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Dutch government websites have been experiencing difficulties on Thursday due to cyberattacks, which are suspected to have originated from Russian hackers. The Rechtspraak.nl website of the Dutch court system was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, while the Dutch Senate's website was also affected. These outages coincided with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to the Netherlands, where he addressed the Dutch Parliament and spoke at the World Forum in The Hague.
Since Thursday morning, the court system's website has been flooded with internet traffic, making it challenging for users to connect. The Council for the Judiciary confirmed that the identity of the attacker remains unknown, but stated that court cases are continuing as usual.
The Council for the Judiciary plans to report the incident to the police and prepare for the possibility of an ongoing attack for several days. The Dutch Senate's spokesperson attributed the issue to "overloading," while the National Cyber Security Center is aware of the situation.
While a spokesperson confirmed that the attack may be the work of "hacktivists" sympathetic to Russia, they declined to provide further information. "Hacktivism" refers to the use of hacking techniques for political or social reasons.
FalconFeeds.io, a cybersecurity firm, speculated that NoName05716, an obscure hacker group, may have launched the attack on the Senate website. These hacktivists have a history of targeting opponents of Russia digitally. DDoS attacks cause websites to slow down to a crawl, making them difficult to access, and the Canadian Senate's website was reportedly targeted by the group last month.
It remains unclear whether the hackers are connected to the Russian state. Several well-known Russian hacker groups, such as Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm) and Cozy Bear, are believed to work for intelligence agencies and have previously targeted the Dutch government.
