Several Official NATO websites were brought down earlier today by Ukrainian hackers over a controversial vote on the secession of Crimea from Ukraine.
The primary website of Nato https://www.nato.int/, the website of its cyber defence center https://www.ccdcoe.org/ and the website of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly https://www.nato-pa.int/ were the premier NATO websites that were brought down with a concerted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack . Nato.int and cccoe.org are still down at the writing of this article.
A Ukrainian Hacker group going under the handle of “Cyber Berkut” claimed responsibility of the attack. A statement issued by them on their website read,
“We, Cyber Berkut, announce that today at 6:00 p.m. we started the cyberattack on NATO resources,” “We, will not allow the presence NATO occupation on the territory of our homeland, because it opposes NATO intervention in Ukraine,” the statement said.
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu confirmed on Twitter that the NATO websites were indeed down for several hours from what’s known as distributed denial-of-service attacks. Hackers apparently attacked several NATO websites Saturday, but they did not interrupt the daily NATO operations nor was the integrity of NATO’s systems affected in anyway, she said.
Cyber Berkut may have posted the statement in regard to Ukraine but the general feeling is that this site may be based in Russia. The group has in the past attacked several Ukrainian websites recently and is believed to be affiliated with Russian intelligence. The other notable thing is that the above statement published by Cyber Berkut is in Russian rather than Ukrainian language.
At the time of writing the Article, two of the NATO websites are still inaccessible.
UPDATE: 2:00 PM GMT, Websites are back to Normal after 7 hours.
