The European Commission became the target of a large-scale distributed denial of service yesterday, which took down internet access for hours.
The Commission confirmed to Politico that it had experienced a massive DDoS attack starting on Thursday afternoon but insisted that all data was safe. The only affected part of the system was the Commission’s internet connection, which got hammered with a large number of requests. A spokesperson explained some of the details:
No data breach has occurred. The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time.
The Commission’s DIGIT team, and later the CERT-EU team confirmed that the situation was under control, even though internet access was still disabled late on Thursday afternoon.
It’s currently unclear who targeted the Commission and why, though this attack comes just as DDoS attacks have multiplied in scope and reach. A recent report suggested that new records are being set almost every month for the number of attacks and the number of connections involved, a trend unlikely to stop, especially given this is not a technologically sophisticated attack.
Source: Politico | EU flag image via Shutterstock
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