Websites of Dutch Political Parties Hit by DDoS Attack Before EU Elections

Pro-Russian hacker group HackNeT attacked a number of Dutch websites belonging to various political parties right before the elections for the European Parliament started across the EU.

An important event such as elections across an entire continent attracts all sorts of criminals, including hackers who deploy DDoS attacks. Their activities have often been seen in the past two years as companies and institutions across the EU are hit by DDoS attacks, although most of the time the organizations’ activity wasn’t affected.

According to a report from Cloudflare, several political websites in the Netherlands were attacked just ahead of the elections and pro-Russian hacker group HackNeT claimed responsibility soon after.

“Daily DDoS mitigations on June 5 reached over 1 billion HTTP requests in the Netherlands, most of which targeted two election or political party websites,” explained Cloudflare. “The attack continued on June 6. Attacks on one website peaked on June 5 at 14:00 UTC (16:00 local time) with 115 million requests per hour, with the attack lasting around four hours. Attacks on another politically-related website peaked at the same time at 65 million requests per hour.”

While it might not seem like much, these are actually orders of magnitude higher than regular traffic, which is why criminals hope the targeted infrastructure won’t withstand the hit, making the websites inaccessible.

These attacks are generally only possible because threat actors use botnets comprised of tens of thousands of devices acting in concert, not unlike the recent botnet network taken down in Operation Endgame by Europol, with the help of Bitdefender and numerous other companies.