Russian hackers are suspected of attacking Belgian local government websites after they mysteriously disappeared from the net on October 7.
Numerous websites of Belgian cities and provinces are inaccessible, public broadcaster VRT reports, with experts citing a large-scale DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks.
By flooding the target or the infrastructure around it with Internet traffic, such attacks aim to maliciously interfere with the regular operation of a targeted server, service, or network.
Among others, the sites of the House of Representatives, the Walloon government, the provinces of Limburg and East Flanders and the sites of the cities of Brussels and Liège are targeted.
According to messages on Telegram, the Russian hacker collective ‘NoName’ is behind the attacks.
This collective reportedly targets websites in countries that allied themselves with Ukraine.
Last week, news broke that Belgium plans to buy 3 CAESER cannons — a type of self-propelled howitzer — and donate them to Ukraine.
“We decided to visit Russophobic Belgium while showing how initiatives in support of the criminal Kiev (sic) regime end,” NoName posted in a statement on Telegram.
It also mentions local elections in Belgium, which take place on October 13.
On March 27, the same group attacked the websites of four Dutch provinces after the Netherlands announced additional support to Kyiv.
“While the Netherlands hands over planes to Ukraine, we send our ‘DDoS greetings’”, they wrote on Telegram.
Such attacks started with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, originally to tackle “Ukranian propaganda media”. Soon, they started to target NATO countries.
Combating DDoS attacks can be challenging, but the ease of mitigation largely depends on the scale and sophistication of the attack.
Simple DDoS attacks can often be mitigated using basic techniques such as IP address filtering or migrating to a new IP address.
However, these methods are generally temporary solutions and may not be effective against more advanced attacks.
More sophisticated defences involve using managed DDoS protection services, firewalls, and content delivery networks (CDNs) to absorb and filter malicious traffic before it reaches the target.
These solutions may require significant investment and expertise, something local governments might slack at due to budgetary restraints.
