DDoS Attack Takes Down Austrian Parliament Website

The Austrian parliament’s website was hit by a suspected cyber attack over the weekend which took the site down for 20 minutes.

Hackers are believed to have used a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to flood the website with digital service requests and, although no data was lost, authorities are now investigating the attack.

“The hacker attack was most likely a so-called DDoS-attack; a similar attack took place last November targeting the websites of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministries,” the parliament said in a statement.

Cyber attack

One of the most common cyber threats around, DDoS attacks have been growing in size and prevalence in recent times, with Corero Network Security predicting that such threats will become the top security priority for businesses and the new norm in 2017.

“While the Mirai botnet is certainly fearsome in terms of its size, its capacity to wreak havoc is also dictated by the various attack vectors it employs, said Dave Larson, CTO/COO at Corero Network Security.

“If a variety of new and complex techniques were added to its arsenal next year, we may see a substantial escalation in the already dangerous DDoS landscape, with the potential for frequent, Terabit-scale DDoS events which significantly disrupt our Internet availability.”

In January, a DDoS attack was responsible for an outage at Lloyds Banking Group that left customers unable to access online banking services for three days, after web security firm Imperva had earlier that month issued a warning to businesses after fending off the largest DDoS attack ever recorded on its network.

But the most high-profile attack in recent months affected domain name service provider Dyn and resulted in a slew major sites – including Twitter, Spotify and Reddit – being taken offline.

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