The European Parliament declares Russia a sponsor of terrorism, then its site goes down

Expand / An iteration of what happens when your site is taken down by a DDoS attack.

The European Parliament's website was taken offline for several hours on Wednesday by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that began shortly after the governing body voted to declare the Russian government a state sponsor of terrorism.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola confirmed the attack on Wednesday afternoon European time, when the site was still unavailable. "A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility," she wrote on Twitter. “Our IT experts oppose this and protect our systems. This, after we proclaimed Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. »

While this message was being reported and written, the website became available again and appeared to be functioning normally.

The pro-Kremlin group Metsola is referring to is likely the one known as Killnet, which emerged at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and published allegations of DDoS attacks in countries supporting the small nation. Targets included police departments, airports and governments in Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Romania, Norway and the United States.

Shortly after Wednesday's attack on the European Parliament began, members of Killnet took to a private channel on Telegram to post screenshots showing that the European Parliament's website is not was not available in 23 countries. The text accompanying the images made a homophobic remark directed at the legislative body.

Enlarge

Enlarge

The outage came shortly after parliament voted overwhelmingly to declare the Kremlin a sponsor of terrorism.

Members of the European Parliament "stress that the deliberate attacks and atrocities committed by Russian forces and their proxies against civilians in Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and other serious violations of international and humanitarian law constitute acts of terror and constitute war crimes," the statement reads. "In light of this, they recognize Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism and as a state that 'uses the means of terrorism'."

The resolution was adopted with 494 votes in favor and 58 against. There were 44 abstentions.

DDoS attacks typically exploit the bandwidth of hundreds, thousands, and in some cases millions of malware-infected computers. Once under their control, attackers trick them into bombarding a target site with more traffic than they can handle, forcing them to deny service to legitimate users. Traditionally, DDoS has been a...