European Parliament under Cyberattack after Declaring Russia ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’

On Wednesday 23 November, some vice presidents of the European Parliament declared that the official website was under a DDoS attack.

Marcel Kolaja on Twitter: “The European Parliament is under a cyber attack. As Quaestor responsible for ICT equipment, I’ve been in touch with the IT department and we will do our best to defend our institution. This happens after the European Parliament declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.”

The responsable for the cybersecurity of the Parliament, and vice-president, Dita Charanzová stated in a tweet that this “sophisticated” cyber-attack came just after the resolution that declared Russia a state ‘sponsor of terrorism’ after Moskow’s missiles killing civilians in Ukraine.

Dita Charanzová writes on twitter:

“The EP was the target of a sophisticated cyber attack this afternoon. Just moments after we adopted the resolution on Russia. Pro-Russian hackers have already claimed responsibility for the attack.”

There’s also some senior of the EP that wants to remain anonymous, that said: “it might be the most sophisticated attack that the Parliament has known so far.”

The DDoS attack consists in sending a lot of traffic to the victim, usually, hackers use a botnet to exponentially increase the number of packets sent to crash the server.

Eva Kaili, another vice president of the EU, reported to Politico that they have a strong indication that the hacking team responsible is called Killnet, a pro-Russia organization.

She also tweeted some updates about the case:

At the moment the attack is ended, but the National Cybersecurity Center based in Belgium confirmed that an investigation is opened at European Level, that’s all they say.

Also published here.