KillNet hackers took down the website of the European parliament’s website on Wednesday, just hours after the legislative body declared Russia a terrorist state.
The outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which works by redirecting large amounts of internet traffic to specific servers in a relatively simple attempt by hacktivists to knock them offline. DDoS attacks flooded networks with massive amounts of data that they couldn’t handle, causing normal traffic to be disrupted or the network to be completely paralyzed.
The total duration of the outage was unknown, but it was first detected following the Russian vote, which took place in the early afternoon to condemn Russia for the “brutal and inhumane” acts inflicted on Ukraine and its citizens since the invasion began.
The President of the European Parliament confirmed the incident, saying that the Parliament’s “IT experts are pushing back against it and protecting our systems.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the European Parliament’s official website was still unavailable. According to Jaume Duch, spokesperson for the European Parliament, the agency is currently working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. The website of the European Parliament reopened shortly after 1700 GMT, about two hours after the institution reported the outage.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.