The group of cybercriminals ‘Noname057’ has claimed responsibility for an attack against the website of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior during election day, on July 23. For a few minutes it was not possible to access the website of the Ministry, one of the official sources of information for data on participation in the elections and their results. The National Cryptological Center (CNI) and the National Police are already investigating the facts.
The group noname057 has published in its propaganda channels of Telegram a message claiming responsibility for these attacks, which have consisted of bringing down the Interior web pages through a denial of service attack.
An attack DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is a malicious cyberattack that aims to crash websites or servers by flooding them with internet traffic,” he explains. Luis Corrons, Avast Security Evangelist. This cyber attack suffered a 74% increase over the last year.
“The sudden rush of traffic overwhelms the target site’s infrastructure, often causing it to fail. Regular users of the site or service cannot access it until the attack is resolved DDoS”.
most attacks DDoS, explains the expert, are carried out throughbotnetsthat is, large networks of computers infected with malware,IoT smart devicesand other Internet-enabled devices that have come under the control of cyber attackers.
The attacker instructs the botnet devices to send massive amounts of connection requests to theIP adressfrom a target website or server.
A victim of a DDoS attack will see a sudden rush of incoming traffic just before the server crashes under the pressure. If you visit a website that is under DDoS attack, it will load extremely slowly or show you a 503 “service unavailable” errorCorrons explains, soYou probably won’t be able to use that site until the attack has ended or it has been repulsed.
But can a DDoS attack be detected?
If a bot is being used in a botnet to carry out a DDoS attack, you may experience certain warning signs, such as csudden drops in performance, mfrequent error messages, bsystem crashes ovInternet speed very low.
To prevent and avoid that botnets infect devices, the expert recommends having antimalware tools that allow them to be detected and blocked, as well as scan and remove any malicious files already on the device.
As for the reasons why this attack could have occurredCorrons explains that “hehe cybercriminals take advantage of any critical moment to do their own thing. On election day, citizens are especially attentive to receiving information and resort to official sources to be able to find out what is happening minute by minute. Therefore, strategically speaking, Attacking the website of a public institution such as the Ministry of the Interior is a way of hindering communications on a particularly delicate date.
