BRUSSELS / LONDON (IT BOLTWISE) – A DDoS attack briefly brought down the websites of Belgian telecommunications providers Proximus and Scarlet. The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 claimed responsibility for the attack, which also affected the Ghent University Hospital. The attacks are related to statements made by the Belgian Defense Minister about NATO.
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On Wednesday morning, the websites of Belgian telecommunications providers Proximus and Scarlet were briefly disrupted by a DDoS attack. The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 claimed responsibility for the attack via Telegram. The Ghent University Hospital was also affected by a DDoS attack at the same time. A Proximus spokesman, Fabrice Gansbeke, confirmed that technicians detected unusual traffic around 7:20 a.m. and took immediate countermeasures. “From 7:30 a.m. we experienced a sharp increase in traffic. The impact was very limited: our systems held up,” he said.
In a DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service, hackers flood a website with massive amounts of data, overloading its servers and making it temporarily inaccessible. Such attacks do not compromise user data. The hacker group NoName057 posted a message on Telegram at 8:53 a.m. boasting about attacks on the Scarlet and Proximus websites and an internal Telenet portal. However, a spokesman for Telenet, Stefan Coenjaerts, rejected the claim. “Our systems were not hacked and no websites were taken offline,” he said.
The hackers cited statements by Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken in a recent interview with Humo magazine as the reason for their attacks, in which he said NATO would “flatten” Moscow if Russia attacked Brussels. “We advise the Belgian minister not to make such statements,” the group wrote. This is not the first time that NoName057 has targeted Belgium. Last year, just before the October elections, pro-Russian hackers attacked Belgian websites on four consecutive days. In March they shut down government websites again.
At the same time, the University Hospital of Ghent (UZ Gent) was affected by a DDoS attack. The disruption resulted in slower communications with a number of external systems, resulting in some information being temporarily unavailable or delayed. Within the hospital itself, all IT applications were functioning normally, limiting the impact on patient care. Treatments and procedures took place as planned, although some consultations were slightly delayed. The hospital confirmed that communications with external systems were fully restored around 11:00 a.m.
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