Russian hackers take down several Belgian government websites

Russian hackers temporarily took down several government websites on Tuesday, including those of prime minister Alexander De Croo and the Chamber of Deputies.

The hacking collective NoName057(16) announced via Telegram that it had "visited Belgium" and had taken down De Croo's site, the Brussels website and that of the Chamber of Deputies.

The pro-Putin group cited Belgium's financial support for president Zelensky's "criminal regime" last year - a position shared by several other "Russophobic" countries - as the reason for the cyber attack.

The issue has since been resolved. In recent months, a number of government websites have suffered similar disruptions due to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

This kind of attack overwhelms websites with an influx of internet traffic generated by hackers using a large number of computers to send a flood of information to the targeted server. The result is a website that is significantly slowed down or even unable to respond to users at all.

^{© AFP PHOTO / THOMAS SAMSON}