Belga News Agency, Belgium's national newswire, was the victim of a cyberattack on Friday morning.
The news site became unavailable from 08:30 on Friday morning but is now functioning again.
The attack marks the fifth consecutive day that Belgian websites have been targeted before Sunday's local elections. The pro-Russian hacker collective NoName057 is reportedly behind the attacks but their involvement in Belga's case has not yet been confirmed.
"We are experiencing a DDoS attack at Belga News Agency," Editor-in-Chief Hans Vandendriessche posted on social media just before 10:00. "We are working hard to make our systems accessible to our customers again as quickly as possible."
"What we are doing now is focusing on filtering suspicious traffic," said Belga’s head of IT Tom Wuytack. "For instance, if we notice an unusual amount of traffic from a certain country, we can block access from that region."
A DDoS is a 'Distributed Denial of Service' attack instigated when the hacker makes a large amount of requests and overloads the website in question. The activity causes a "traffic jam" and blocks site access for other users.
⚠️⚠️⚠️
Nous subissons une attaque DDoS chez @BelgaNewsAgency . Nous mettons tout en œuvre pour rendre nos systèmes à nouveau accessibles à nos clients le plus rapidement possible. — Hans Vandendriessche (@HansVDD) October 11, 2024
The incident follows a string of other DDoS attacks on government websites this week, which experts say are intended to make the public feel uneasy and damage victims' reputations rather than breach sensitive data or damage the online system.
"A DDoS attack is not sophisticated [but] it requires a great deal of effort on the part of the affected department to completely restore the network," the Centre for Cybersecurity (the victim of a DDoS attack this week) stated. "The systems have not been penetrated and, consequently, no data has been stolen. The consequences are mainly embarrassing."
News outlets belonging to Mediahuis were targeted too.
This article was updated at 13:00.
