Russian Hackers Take Down Ministry Of The Interior Website During Spanish Elections

A group of hackers believed to be close to the Russian intelligence services took down the website of the Ministry of the Interior this Sunday, July 23, during Spain’s election day.

Investigators from the National Police and the National Intelligence Centre (CNI) specialising in the field of cybersecurity are already investigating what happened.

According to sources from the department headed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the attack occurred at around 4 pm. The website subsequently remained out of operation until 7:45 pm.

‘NoName057’ has been named as being responsible

A pro-Russian group that first appeared in March 2020, calling itself  ‘NoName057’, are named as responsible for today’s attack, according to elespanol.com.

This same group of hackers knocked down the Puertos del Estado website with a similar attack one and a half months ago.

It also claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on Ukrainian, American, and European websites, along with those of government agencies, media companies, and private companies.

Today’s cyber warfare was apparently carried out ​​through a so-called distributed denial of service (DdoS) attack. Using this form of virtual threat, hackers can crash a web page by directing a large avalanche of traffic towards it. As a result, they manage to block it and ensure that no one is able to consult it.

Russian cyberattacks on Spain have become more frequent

In recent months, State agencies have received an average of 50 or 60 serious attacks aimed at collapsing the public sector. In general, they are perpetrated by international groups, mostly Russian.

These types of threats have been taking place on a regular basis since Spain offered its support to Ukraine, either through humanitarian aid or via batches of weapons that arrived at its borders within a few weeks.

When Spain expressed its support for Ukraine and announced the shipment of its Leopard 2a4 tanks, two or three days later there was a campaign of attacks against virtual spaces of high state institutions.

Groups such as Killnet (a cyber gang associated with the Kremlin) and the group detected in the cyber attack on Puertos del Estado, have been indiscriminately launching threats since Spain took over the presidency of the EU.