Reuters. Ukrainian hackers from a group called Cyber Berkut have claimed responsibility for the downtime of three NATO websites.
The websites nato.int, pa.int, ccdcoe.org stopped working after distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
According to the hackers, the attack began on Saturday. NATO representatives admitted that several of their websites were the target of “large-scale DDOS attacks” but that their data and systems were not affected by the attacks.
The attacks lasted about 24 hours.
In a statement posted on cyber-berkut.org in Russian, the hackers claim that they carried out the attack because they do not want NATO to intervene in Ukraine.
After the attack was stopped, the hacktivists ironically noted that if NATO cannot protect its systems, it probably cannot secure European citizens either.
Berkut, which means “golden eagle” in Ukrainian, is the name of the special police force that was tasked with handling the anti-government protests that recently took place in Ukraine.
The Cyber Berkut group appears to be somehow connected to Ukraine's Anonymous, another hacktivist group that advocates for Ukraine's independence from NATO and the West in general.
In November 2013, Anonymous Ukraine launched DDOS attacks against the NATO CCDCOE website. Later, the hackers leaked files that were allegedly stolen from the opposition's computer systems.
