Hacktivists are carrying out DDoS attacks on European political parties that represent and promote strategies that oppose their interests, according to a report from Cloudflare.
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The European Parliament elections held in the Netherlands and 26 other countries across the EU, sparking politically motivated cyberattacks
Cloudflare says it has mitigated at least three waves of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on various websites related to the Dutch elections, as well as several political parties. The internet company shared information about two DDoS attacks that occurred on June 5 and 6.
The first peaked at 115 million requests per hour, with one site receiving 73,000 requests per second for four hours.
The second DDoS attack was a bit lighter, reaching 44 million requests per hour and peaking at 52,000 requests per second on one of the targets, again targeting political websites in the Netherlands.
Cloudflare claims to have thwarted both attempts to overwhelm and disrupt targeted websites using its automated detection and mitigation services.
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Russian "Hacktivists"
On Telegram, the Hacktivists group known as “HackNeT” claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks, announcing the victims as PVV (Party for Freedom) and FvD (Forum for Democracy).
Surprisingly, both parties are right-wing nationalist movements that have previously expressed skepticism about the roles of the European Union and NATO in international conflicts and have shown a rather sympathetic stance towards Russia, opposing the imposition of sanctions on the country.
This relatively new hacktivist group should not be confused with the similarly named “XAKNET,” which Mandiant linked to the Sandworm (APT44) hackers earlier this year.
On June 1, 2024, Germany's Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs announced a " serious cyberattack " on the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) party network , which was working together with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to investigate and mitigate the attack.
The CDU has consistently condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and supports maintaining and intensifying sanctions until Russia withdraws its forces from Ukrainian territory.
German authorities did not share many details about the attack, but they informed all parties in the German Bundestag about how to protect themselves by intensifying all protective measures.
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A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, such as that on European political parties, is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet. This is achieved by using multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. These attacks can cause significant disruption, preventing legitimate users from accessing the targeted online services. The severity of a DDoS attack can vary, from a minor and temporary inconvenience to causing extensive, long-term outages and financial losses. Understanding and mitigating DDoS attacks is vital to maintaining the security and availability of Internet services.
Source: bleepingcomputer
