The public parts of the Rechtspraak.nl website have been unavailable or poorly accessible since Thursday. The cause is a DDoS attack. The attack has no impact on the handling of court cases: they continue as usual.
The site announces this via a statement on LinkedIn (1).
Rechtspraak.nl is the online portal for matters related to the administration of justice in our country. You will find information about proceedings in court cases, as well as judgments of courts and tribunals, a news overview of recent judgments and a variety of registers. The site also has a protected environment for citizens, organizations and legal professionals to follow the latest developments in their cases.
In short, Rechtspraak.nl is a spider in the web for lawyers and other professionals working in the legal system.
They have been experiencing problems with the website since Thursday morning, May 4. Several public parts of the site, such as the news overview, have been unavailable or poorly accessible since then. Registers and parts of the website that require logging in are only available via a direct link. The poor accessibility is caused by a DDoS attack.
Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attack is a method by which hackers take down a computer network by flooding it with large amounts of connection requests and data requests. Sooner or later, the server becomes overloaded, resulting in either no response or very slow response, even to legitimate visitors seeking information.
A DDoS attack is like a traffic jam. When everything is fine, all the cars on the highway move along nicely. When a DDoS attack occurs, the number of cars on the highway increases. At some point, there are so many cars that normal flow is no longer possible. Then a traffic jam occurs on the highway. Traffic then comes to a standstill, or moves very slowly.
Who is behind the DDoS attack on Rechtspraak.nl is unknown. In any case, the attack does not affect the handling of court cases. The site administrator announced via LinkedIn that the aftermath of the DDoS attack is expected to last several days. Finally, criminal charges will be filed.
The Judiciary has indicated in the past that it wants to increase its commitment to digitization in the coming years. A scenario like today could then just repeat itself.
Update (May 6, 2023): the administrator of Rechtspraak.nl announced today that the website is accessible again. Various measures have been taken to limit the impact of the DDoS attack. The site is not saying which measures were taken. It is still unknown who is behind the attack.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7059902029669781504/
