Security News > 2024 > June > DDoS attacks target EU political parties as elections begin
Hacktivists are conducting DDoS attacks on European political parties that represent and promote strategies opposing their interests, according to a report by Cloudflare.
Cloudflare reports that it has mitigated at least three distributed denial of service attack waves on various election-related sites in the Netherlands, as well as several political parties.
The internet company has shared information about two DDoS attacks occurring on June 5 and 6.
The second DDoS attack was a bit lighter, reaching 44 million requests per hour and peaking at 52,000 requests per second on one of the targets, once again targeting political sites in the Netherlands.
On Telegram, the hacktivist group known as 'HackNeT' took responsibility for the attacks, announcing the victims as PVV and FvD. Strangely, both parties are right-wing nationalist movements that have previously expressed skepticism about the European Union and NATO's roles in international conflicts and have shown a rather sympathetic stance toward Russia, opposing the imposition of sanctions on the country.
The German authorities did not share many details about that attack but informed all parties in the German Bundestag about how to protect themselves by ramping up all protective measures.