The Port of Rotterdam, the largest seaport in Europe, reportedly suffered a major cyber attack that knocked off its official website for hours.
According to Dutch news agency RTL Nieuws, a group of pro-Russian hackers targeted the Port of Rotterdam’s website and bombarded it with a DDoS attack. The websites of several other Dutch ports, including Groningen, Amsterdam, and Den Helder were also targeted by the threat actors.
While the official websites of the port authorities in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Den Helder were offline for several hours, the Groningen Seaport website was offline for the entire weekend.
“For us, the website is important because we can inform the public, but we are not dependent on the website,” a spokesperson for the Port of Rotterdam said.
Port authorities also said that no other internal systems were affected by the attack and systems used for handling shipping were not impacted.
The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre reportedly informed the Port of Rotterdam last week that the DDoS attacks were carried out by pro-Russian hacker groups. According to cyber security expert Tom Hegel of cybersecurity company SentinelOne, the attacks were carried out by a group of hacktivists going by the name “NoName057(16)”.
“The Netherlands wants to buy Leopard 1s to deliver to Ukraine. By the way, according to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, 8 Leopard 1 tanks have already been destroyed. Bring the next one!” the hacker group posted on its Telegram channel.
In January, the group claimed responsibility for launching DDoS attacks on multiple Danish Banks, including Denmark’s central bank, Sydbank, Sparekassen Sjælland-Fyn, Bankinvest, and Jyskebank. The group also attacked the websites of the French Senate and France’s National Assembly and caused disruptions to Canadian government websites during Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal’s visit.
The main motive of the hacker group is to aid Russia and to routinely target Ukraine and NATO organisations with DDoS attacks, more so in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
KillNet, another pro-Russian hacker group, has also routinely targeted a number of governments and organisations that have criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last year, the European Parliament’s website suffered a DDoS attack launched by the group that forced it to take its official website offline for almost two hours.
The attack on the European Parliament’s website took place not long after the chamber designated Russia as a terrorist state because of Moscow’s strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine.
