Protesters in Germany have been camping out at the Hambach
Forest, where the German energy company RWE has
plans to mine for coal. Meanwhile, it’s been reported that RWE’s website was
under attack as police efforts to clear the protesters from the woods were
underway.
According to Deutsche Welle, unknown attackers launched
a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), which took down RWE’s
website for virtually all of Tuesday. No other systems were attacked, but
efforts to clear away the protesters have been ongoing for the better part of
the month, and activists have reportedly made claims that they will be getting
more aggressive in their tactics.
Activists have occupied the forest in hopes
of preventing RWE from moving
forward with plans to expand its coal mining operations, which would
effectively clear the forest. In addition to camping out in the forest, the
protesters have reportedly taken to YouTube to spread their message.
Reports claim that a clip was posted last
week by Anonymous Deutsch that warned, "If you don't immediately stop the
clearing of the Hambach Forest, we will attack your servers and bring down your
web pages, causing you economic damage that you will never recover
from," DW reported.
"Together, we will bring RWE to its
knees. This is our first and last warning,” the voice from the video reportedly
added.
DDoS
attacks are intended to cripple websites, and the attack on RWE allowed the
activists to make good on their threat, at least for one day.
““This is yet another example that
illustrates the DDoS threat to
[softer targets in] CNI [critical network infrastructure]. RWE is an
operator of an essential service (energy) in Germany. The lights didn’t go out
but their public-facing website was offline as a result of this attack,” said
Andrew Llyod, president, Corero Network Security.
In a recent DDoS report, Corero researchers
found that “after facing one attack, one in five organizations will be
targeted again within 24 hours.”
No comments:
Post a Comment