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Dutch political websites hit by cyber attacks as EU voting starts

06/06/2024

  * Joao Tome
    Joao Tome

3 min read
Dutch political websites hit by cyber attacks as EU voting starts

The 2024 European Parliament election started in the Netherlands
today, June 6, 2024, and will continue through June 9 in the other 26
countries that are part of the European Union. Cloudflare observed
DDoS attacks targeting multiple election or politically-related
Internet properties on election day in the Netherlands, as well as
the preceding day.

These elections are highly anticipated. It's also the first European
election without the UK after Brexit.

According to news reports, several websites of political parties in
the Netherlands suffered cyberattacks on Thursday, with a pro-Russian
hacker group called HackNeT claiming responsibility.

On June 5 and 6, 2024, Cloudflare systems automatically detected and
mitigated DDoS attacks that targeted at least three
politically-related Dutch websites. Significant attack activity
targeted two of them, and is described below.

A DDoS attack, short for Distributed Denial of Service attack, is a
type of cyber attack that aims to take down or disrupt Internet
services such as websites or mobile apps and make them unavailable
for users. DDoS attacks are usually done by flooding the victim's
server with more traffic than it can handle. To learn more about DDoS
attacks and other types of attacks, visit our Learning Center.

Attackers typically use DDoS attacks but also exploit other
vulnerabilities and types of attacks simultaneously.

Daily DDoS mitigations on June 5 reached over 1 billion HTTP requests
in the Netherlands, most of which targeted two election or political
party websites. The attack continued on June 6. Attacks on one
website peaked on June 5 at 14:00 UTC (16:00 local time) with 115
million requests per hour, with the attack lasting around four hours.
Attacks on another politically-related website peaked at the same
time at 65 million requests per hour.

[image1-7]

On June 6, the first politically-related site with the highest peak
on June 5 referenced above was attacked again for several hours. The
main attack peak occurred at 11:00 UTC (13:00 local time), with 44
million requests per hour.

The main June 5 DDoS attack on one of the websites peaked at 14:13
UTC (16:13 local time), reaching 73,000 requests per second (rps) in
an attack that lasted for a few hours. This attack is illustrated by
the blue line in the graph below, which shows that it ramped slowly
over the first half of the day, and then appeared to abruptly stop at
18:06. And on June 6, the main attack on the second website peaked at
11:01 UTC (13:01 local time) with 52,000 rps.

[image3-1]

Geopolitical motivations

Elections, geopolitical changes, and disputes also impact the online
world and cyberattacks. Our DDoS threat report for Q1 2024 gives a
few recent examples. One notable case was the 466% surge in DDoS
attacks on Sweden after its acceptance into the NATO alliance,
mirroring the pattern observed during Finland's NATO accession in
2023.

As we've seen in recent years, real-world conflicts, disputed and
highly anticipated elections, and wars are always accompanied by
cyberattacks. We reported (1, 2) on an increase in cyberattacks
following the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, 2023. We've
put together a list of recommendations to optimize your defenses
against DDoS attacks, and you can also follow our step-by-step
wizards to secure your applications and prevent DDoS attacks.

If you want to follow more trends and insights about the Internet and
elections in particular, you can check Cloudflare Radar, and more
specifically our new 2024 Elections Insights report, that we're
keeping up to date as national elections take place throughout the
year.

We protect entire corporate networks, help customers build
Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerate any website or
Internet application, ward off DDoS attacks, keep hackers at bay, and
can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that
makes your Internet faster and safer.

To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet,
start here. If you're looking for a new career direction, check
out our open positions.
Discuss on Hacker News
AttacksDDoSPoliticsElection SecurityEuropeEuropean Union

Follow on X

Joao Tome|@emot
Cloudflare|@cloudflare

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