A denial of service attack has knocked down the Eurocontrol portal, the main organization dedicated to air traffic management in Europe. It is a platform in which the airlines and all the actors involved in the sector consult the traffic situation in the continent and exchange information, although for the moment there have been no incidents on the flights. Russia-based cybercriminals Authorship of the attack has been attributed in networks.
The groups Anonymous Russia and bloodnet They boast of having attacked the Eurocontrol platform and having eliminated its subdomains. As you have been able to verify Vozpopuliit is not possible to access the website of the organization, whose headquarters are in Brussels and is in charge of centralizing the management of flight plans on the continent.
“We support our Member States and their respective civil and military areas (including air navigation service providers, airspace users, airports and aircraft/equipment manufacturers) in a joint effort to make aviation more Europe safer, more efficient, more profitable and with a minimum environmental impact”, detailed Eurocontrol about their activity on their own website before suffering the attack that brought down their servers.
Founded in 1963, this organization dedicated to air traffic management in Europe has 41 member countries -including Spain-, a budget of 865 million and a staff made up of more than 1,800 professionals. The crash of the Eurocontrol servers has so far not resulted in anomalies in European traffic.
The agression
The method chosen by cybercriminals to take down Eurocontrol’s servers has been a denial of service attack. Or what is the same, launch a number of input requests so high that the system is not capable of assimilating itproducing the blockage for a variable period of time, depending on the security response offered by the attacked entity and the magnitude of the aggression.
pro-russian forums have disseminated messages in which cybercriminal groups based in the country of Vladimir Putin, they attribute the origin of the attack, as this newspaper has been able to prove. It is an orchestrated campaign, not only because of the procedure chosen to bring down the servers; In the last few hours, similar episodes have been recorded on other platforms of the European administration, such as that of the Polish Police.
Links with intelligence services
Vulnerability in cyberspace is one of the aspects that the Spanish Department of National Security (DSN) analyzes in its latest annual report: “In 2022 the upward trend of ransomware-type attacks continues, used in cybercrime campaigns against business corporations, organizations , official agencies and critical sectors for society”, details the document, which has information from the CNI, State Security Forces and Corps and all the bodies involved in national security.
“The interested use of cybercriminal or cyberhacktivist groups by Intelligence Services has been detected, which allows them to hide authorship and mask the real objective of the attack – details the DSN -. Some of these groups focus on ransomware, such as Conti, or in denial of service, like Killnet.”
