Categories: CyberCrimeSecurity

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.

DDoS attack

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.

Quiz: Is your cyber security knowledge up to scratch?

Sam Pudwell

Sam Pudwell joined Silicon UK as a reporter in December 2016. As well as being the resident Cloud aficionado, he covers areas such as cyber security, government IT and sports technology, with the aim of going to as many events as possible.

Recent Posts

Amazon Workers In North Carolina Reject Unionisation

Workers at Amazon warehouse near Raleigh vote against joining union, as company continues to challenge…

7 hours ago

China President Xi Meets With Top Tech Leaders

High-profile meeting with tech leaders seen as signal China is boosting tech sector after years…

8 hours ago

South Korea To Buy 10,000 GPUs For National AI Hub

South Korea hopes to gain leg up in international AI race with infusion of private…

8 hours ago

BYD, Geely, Great Wall Add DeepSeek AI To EVs

Chinese electric vehicle giants rush to incorporate DeepSeek AI tech to cars after it creates…

9 hours ago

South Korea Suspends DeepSeek From App Stores

South Korean data authority suspends Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek from Apple, Google app stores while…

9 hours ago

Google Puts ‘Profits Over Privacy’ With Tracking Change

Privacy advocates criticise Google over decision to allow companies to track users via digital fingerprints,…

10 hours ago