Belgian media targeted in fifth day of cyberattacks

Belga news agency has been targeted in the latest wave of cyberattacks, in the fifth consecutive day of hacking activity against Belgium. 

Belga experienced a major disruption to its live feed due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Friday morning, rendering the site inaccessible from around 8.30. A DDoS attack floods a website with excessive traffic, overloading the server and causing it to go offline. 

It remains unclear whether the attack was carried out by the pro-Russian hacker group NoName, which has been linked to several recent cyberattacks in Belgium. Over the past few days, various government, financial and port websites have been hit by the collective.

“What we are doing now is focusing on filtering suspicious traffic,” said Belga’s head of IT, Tom Wuytack. “For instance, if we notice an unusual amount of traffic from a certain country, we can block access from that region.” He added that although Belga faces daily cyberattacks, this particular attack has been more concentrated.

^{The Center for Cybersecurity Belgium © BELGA PHOTO HATIM KAGHAT}