The website of the Municipality of Groningen was down for several hours Monday and Tuesday. The cause was a DDoS attack. As a result of the incident, the municipality plans to better secure the site, including an additional firewall.
Anyone who visited the website of the Municipality of Groningen last Monday or Tuesday most likely saw an error message on the screen. The site was down due to a DDoS attack. In such an attack, a company network or server is flooded with connection requests. Due to the large amounts of connection requests, the server becomes overloaded. Loading a page then takes an incredibly long time, or is simply no longer possible.
You can think of a DDoS attack as a traffic jam. Normally it moves along nicely on the highway until the number of cars increases sharply. Then you get slow-moving or stalled traffic. Traffic jams and delays are the result.
In the case of the Groningen municipality, the website was flooded with requests via VPN servers from the Netherlands and Romania. As a result, the municipality's servers became overloaded, causing the website to go down for several hours early this week. The municipality managed to repel the DDoS attack by blocking IP addresses of the VPNs used.
To make it more difficult for hackers to take down the website of the municipality of Groningen in the future, the municipality is going to take additional security measures. "With 25,000 hacking attempts per day, it is all hands on deck to protect residents' personal data and other data," a municipality spokesperson told the Dagblad van het Noorden. For that reason, the municipality's site will now be secured with an additional firewall.
The Municipality of Groningen confirmed Wednesday on Facebook and X that the websites had been "fixed" again.
Who is responsible for the DDoS attack on the municipality of Groningen is unknown. It is notable, however, that the cyber attack occurred at the same time that the websites of the provinces of North Holland, North Brabant and Groningen were offline for hours earlier this week.
It was suggested that these attacks had been carried out by pro-Russian hackers. They systematically attack websites in EU member states as part of their warfare with Ukraine. Because of our political and financial support to Ukraine, the Netherlands is a favorite target of Russian hacker groups such as Killnet and NoName057(16).
In the recent past, the Council for the Judiciary, the Senate, the Chamber of Commerce (CoC), several port companies in Groningen, industry association OV-NL and Maastricht Aachen Airport, among others, have been bombarded with DDoS attacks.
