A distributed denial of service attack has reportedly disrupted the internet services connecting to most parts of Belgium shutting down the much needed web services to Parliament, Universities and some Scientific Institutes.
Highly placed sources say that the attack was a large scale sophisticated attack that hit Belnet that offers internet services to many of the government agencies and private entities across the country in the Western Europe.
DDoS aka distributed denial of service attack is a cyber attack variant where hackers use botnets to flood web servers with fake web traffic-thus disrupting web services on a partial or permanent note to many.
The attack took place at 11: 00 am CEST on Tuesday where students of many universities could not access the online services for hours.
And Belnet has apparently agreed that the incident could have affected over 200 organizations that includes private and public companies.
Belnet has issued a public statement that it has taken all Cybersecurity measures to avoid such incidents in future and has informed Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) to investigate the incident.
A state funded attack is suspected in this incident. However, there is no official conformation from Belnet.
NOTE- Belnet is an internet service provider for government services across Belgium and is known as the world’s first company to offer Ipv6 Connectivity and multi-cast to customers. In February 2020, as a part of the Connecting Europe Facility Programme, Belnet has introduced Belgian Node of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure.
