Belgian military intelligence service websites attacked by Russian hackers

The Belgian Defence Ministry has confirmed that the pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 carried out a DDoS cyberattack of several of the Belgian military intelligence service ADIV’s websites on Thursday. The hackers claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on Telegram yesterday.

At 1:18pm on Thursday the cybercriminals posted a message on Telegram claiming responsibility for the attack on several ADIV sites. The explicitly refer edto a recent interview with the Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken (Flemish nationalist) in the weekly magazine Humo magazine. In the interview Mr Francken said that NATO would “flatten” Moscow if Russia attacked Brussels. In its Telegram post NoName057 writes “We advise the Belgian minister not to make such statements”.

Immediately after the attack, the press agency Belga noticed that ADIV's general website was temporarily unavailable. In a DDoS attack, servers are “bombarded” with requests, causing them to become overloaded and unavailable to genuine users. However, no data is stolen.

On Friday a Defence Ministry spokesperson confirmed the attack. “We can confirm that there was probably a DDoS attack on the ADIV website. There was no breach of the site and there are no indications that sensitive information was accessed or that data was leaked. The website was unavailable for a short period of time but is now fully operational again.”

Belgium has been targeted by NoName057 for some time now. At the end of last year, the group launched cyber-attacks against several government agencies and media outlets for several days in a row. They have been more active again during the past few days. On Wednesday, they targeted the websites of telecom providers Proximus and Scarlet were attacked. More cyberattacks are likely in the coming days. Rumours are circulating on Telegram that NoName057 has launched a new campaign against Belgium.