Several Belgian websites affected by DDOS attack
News
Update: 9/10/2024
Currently, websites of several Belgian municipalities and organisations are besieged by successive DDOS attacks. As in the past few days, the websites of some Belgian municipalities are overloaded by a DDOS today.
On Monday 7 October 2024, 7 provinces experienced problems with the availability of their websites due to a DDOS attack. On 8 October, the websites of some 15 municipalities and ports were targeted. As many Flemish municipalities use the same hosting partner, its servers became overloaded and the websites of more than 300 municipalities experienced interruptions for a short period (between 3 minutes to several hours).
A DDoS attack is a cyber attack in which excessive online traffic is sent to, for example, a website, making it temporarily unavailable to users. Organisations under attack can take temporary anti-DDoS measures. The CCB sends alerts to potential victims so they can protect themselves more quickly.
In this week's attacks, the public website of the affected services is offline for a limited time, but otherwise there is little or no disruption to services. Many organisations have taken steps to mitigate the impact. A DDoS attack is not a sophisticated attack, but requires a lot of effort from the affected service to get the network fully back online. Systems are not broken into. The consequences are usually inconvenient.
These attacks are announced and carried out by a pro-Russian hacktivist group targeting European and NATO-related targets. In particular, the group targets government agencies, the media and private companies in order to attract media attention.