Killnet launched a Distributed Denial of Service attack(DDoS) on the healthcare websites of the United States and Netherlands, disrupting their operations for several hours. And preliminary investigations revealed that the attack was launched in retaliation for Biden’s pledge to send Abrams battle tanks to support Ukraine against Putin led nation.
The University of Michigan Hospital and Stanford Health Care Center are two of the most renowned websites that were targeted in the attack, and the campaign might intensify further to disrupt critical infrastructure in the coming weeks.
However, anticipating such threats in advance, Biden administration has issued orders to public and private entities managing the critical infrastructure to bolster their cybersecurity measures on a proactive note.
On a separate note, few of the dutch hospitals were also targeted in the attack by the Russian hacktivists. For instance, a University Medical Center hospital in the city of Groningen was also targeted with fake web traffic, but it did not affect any of the medical operations.
NOTE 1- Early last week, Killnet, apparently being funded by GRU, launched a cyber attack on private and public entities in Germany. As the country is supporting worn torn Kyiv by sending defense missile systems.
NOTE 2- A denial of service attack is caused when hackers engage thousands of bots connected in a network to launch fake web traffic. Thus, causing an overload on the servers and denies service to actual traffic causing disruption and resulting in monetary losses.
NOTE 3- Netherlands healthcare computer response team, Z-CERT acknowledged the news and attributed the attack to Killnet.
