The European Parliament’s official website came under assault on Wednesday, hours after it passed a resolution designating Russia as a ‘state supporter of terrorism,’ according to AFP. The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, reported that a pro-Kremlin organisation had taken responsibility for the cyberattack.
‘A sophisticated cyberattack is currently taking place on the European Parliament website. The perpetrators are a pro-Kremlin organisation. Our IT professionals are fending it off and defending our systems. This comes after we labelled Russia as an official supporter of terrorism ‘, Tweeted Metsola. The hashtag ‘#SlavaUkraini stands for Glory to Ukraine!’ Metsola said, ‘My response: #SlavaUkraini’.
The @Europarl_EN is under a sophisticated cyberattack. A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility.
Our IT experts are pushing back against it & protecting our systems.
This, after we proclaimed Russia as a State-sponsor of terrorism.
My response: #SlavaUkraini
— Roberta Metsola (@EP_President) November 23, 2022
According to the website Euronews, the top spokeswoman for the European Parliament said that the outage was caused by ‘high amounts of external network traffic’. According to a senior member of the Parliament, ‘it could be the most sophisticated attack the Parliament has ever known,’ Politico stated. The assault was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, in which servers receive a flood of traffic in an effort to prevent users from accessing websites.
Russian hacker organisations are notorious for using DDoS assaults as a preferred tool, particularly to protest against political decisions made in European nations to help Ukraine in the conflict, which reached its ninth month in November. ‘We have solid evidence that it originates from Killnet, the Russian-connected cyber group. It simply disabled external access to the Parliament’s website ‘, Eva Kaili, a Greek MEP vice president, was reported by Politico as stating.
The European Parliament voted earlier in the day to pass a resolution denouncing Russia as a ‘state supporter of terrorism’ and a state that employs ‘means of terrorism’ because to the ‘brutal and cruel’ crimes committed against Ukraine since the start of its invasion earlier this year. In a resolution, MEPs stated that ‘the deliberate attacks and atrocities carried out by the Russian Federation against the civilian population of Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and other serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law amount to acts of terror against the Ukrainian population and constitute war crimes’.
The resolution continued, ‘In the light of the foregoing, (the European Parliament) identifies Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism and as a state which utilises means of terrorism’. With 494 votes in favour, 58 against, and 44 abstentions, the motion was adopted.
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