Russian hackers temporarily shut down several government websites, including those of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and the Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday.
The hackers’ collective, NoName057(16), announced via Telegram that they had “visited Belgium”, taking down Prime Minister De Croo’s site, the Brussels website and the Chamber’s.
Citing Belgium’s financial aid to President Zelensky’s "criminal regime” over the past year – a stance shared by several other "Russophobic" countries – as their rationale for the cyberattack, the pro-Putin group stated.
The issue has since been resolved. In recent months, numerous government sites have experienced similar interruptions due to what’s known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
This kind of attack overwhelms websites with an influx of internet traffic, generated by hackers using a multitude of computers to send a flood of information to the targeted server. The result is a significantly slowed-down site or even a site that can’t respond to users at all.
