Security News > 2022 > May > Italian CERT: Hacktivists hit govt sites in ‘Slow HTTP’ DDoS attacks
Italy's Computer Security Incident Response Team has disclosed recent DDoS attacks against crucial government sites in the country over the past couple of days.
DDoS is an attack that aims to deplete a server's available resources, making it unable to respond to legitimate user requests and rendering the sites it hosts inaccessible.
Pro-Russian hacktivists known as the Killnet group claimed responsibility for the attacks and are the same group that launched similar attacks against Romanian portals and the Bradley Airport in the US. In response to news stories about the DDoS attacks against Italy, Killnet published a message to Telegram stating that further attacks may be coming in the future.
As part of the announcement, CSIRT explained that the attacks on the country's government, ministry, parliament, and even army websites, used the so-called "Slow HTTP" technique.
CSIRT characterizes "Slow HTTP" as an unusual type of DDoS attack, warning system administrators that their existing defenses may not be effective if they are not targeted towards the attack.
"With regard to the recent DDOS attacks that occurred starting from 11 May last against national and international subjects, it was found that they were carried out using techniques that differ from the most common DDOS attacks of volumetric type 1, thus passing unnoticed to the protection systems commonly used on the market against this type of attack as they occur using a limited bandwidth."