Pro-Russian hacktivists wanted to paralyze the website of the Canton of Geneva with a DDoS attack on Wednesday, but they attacked the wrong domain, according to research by Watson. A message has been published in the Telegram messenger service by the group “NoName057(16)”. Accordingly, the attackers did not attack the official domain “ge.ch”, but geneve.com. This is the Geneva tourism website.
In the Telegram posting, the Russian-speaking hacktivists justify the new attacks with an appearance by the Ukrainian president on Thursday, which will be broadcast live to the Swiss parliament.
Astonishing: The pro-Russian hacktivists also mention the SVP in their post, writing that the head of the Swiss People’s Party has criticized the upcoming event quite harshly.
Server overload attacks by the pro-Russian group have increased since the beginning of the week. The background is the war in Ukraine, for which Russia is to blame.
Basel-Stadt website «down»
On Wednesday morning there was a major internet outage in the canton of Basel-Stadt: all administration websites, including the police, were offline, the Keystone-SDA news agency reported. There were initially no reasons for the outage. It was later said that the trigger was a DDoS attack that overloaded the website with targeted requests.
The assumption is that it is a DDoS attack by the pro-Russian hacktivists.
According to the Presidential Department of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, no data would be lost in a DDoS attack.
The IT specialists of the canton quickly noticed the attack and intervened immediately, so that uninterrupted accessibility could be restored as quickly as possible. The public will be informed of any new findings in due course.
The website of the cantonal parliament, where the Grand Council met on Wednesday, was normally accessible.
The population of Basel-Stadt was hit by a serious data theft last month. The ransomware gang Bianlian made about 1.2 terabytes of Basel Education Department data accessible on the dark web.
Sources
With material from the Keystone-SDA news agency
- Telegram channel of «NoName057(16)»
Source: Watson
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
