Norway is experiencing serious cyber threat from state funded actors and has become a latest victim to a distributed denial of service attack aka DdoS attack. According to the Norway’s Ministry of Local and Regional Development about 12 of its websites were experiencing unusual web traffic because of a software vulnerability at the technology service provider.
This led to immense disruption in online services leading to intermittent disruptions on occasional intervals from Sunday last week.
As Norway is the neighboring nation of Russia and supports Ukraine in its war with Moscow with supply essentials, gas and ammunition, the attack might be the work of some pro-Russian gang i.e., Killnet.
The PM’s office of the said country is yet to release an official statement on this note. However, it issued a clarity that the IT service provider’s platform of the Prime Minister is different and so has assured that the websites serving the leader of the nation are intact and working fine.
Now, to those who aren’t aware of a DdoS attack, here’s a gist. A distributed denial of service attack also referred as denial-of-service attack is kind of fake web traffic generated by hackers through bots, targeting actual web servers of individual companies, corporates, and government organization. This makes the servers operate with overwhelmed traffic, thus making them unavailable to server actual web traffic.
These attacks are launched often by state funded actors who are either paid by other nation leaders or competitors to bring down the online presence of the victims to a big halt. In such situations, as most websites are protected by network threat protection tools like Cloudflare, they do not fall prey to such attacks. However, if the attacks are filled with sophistication, ill-protected network servers usually become easy targets to such attacks, that can disrupt the digital operations for hours or days.
