SENT TO BRUSSELS. A hacker attack hit the website of the European Parliament on the very day in which the Strasbourg Chamber approved a resolution which defines Russia as “a state that uses terrorist means” and which invites the EU to diplomatically isolate Moscow. Some pages of the institution’s web portal became inaccessible around lunchtime and the IT technicians immediately set to work to understand the reasons. The attack was claimed by Killnet, the pro-Russian hacker group which in the past had already targeted various institutional websites, including that of the White House.
The spokesman of the Parliament, Jaume Duch, confirmed that accessibility to the site was found to be limited “due to high levels of network traffic from outside”. A decidedly anomalous traffic and in fact “related to a DDOS attack, Distributed Denial of Service”. The institution has made it known that “the team of the European Parliament is working to solve this problem as soon as possible”.
In the early afternoon in the Parliament building in Strasbourg, where the plenary meeting is underway, there were also problems accessing the wi-fi network, but according to initial analyzes this problem is not connected to the attack on the website.