Pro-Russian hackers bring down Dutch hospital website

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Pro-Russian hackers are believed to have launched cyberattacks against hospitals in the Netherlands and other European countries in retaliation for their aid to Ukraine.

Z-Cert, an organization that specializes in digital security for the healthcare sector, said the UMCG teaching hospital in Groningen was hit by a DDoS attack, bringing its website down.

on Monday website homepage I got a message that it is not available. “While we are working hard to resolve this, we cannot give an indication of how long this will take.”

This hospital was one of several facilities targeted by Killnet. Killnet is a Russian group that specializes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, in which a website is overwhelmed by a sudden burst of access requests from many computers.

RTL kirnet saidAn online chat group with 92,000 participants also called on supporters to attack hospitals in Utrecht, Rotterdam and Nijmegen.

“It’s so simple,” the Killnet founder wrote in a group chat. “We are destroying medical facilities in these countries to support the Nazis in Ukraine.”

A spokesman for UMCG said the attack only affected public sections of the website.

“Patients who want to look up their medical information may find it difficult, for example, if they want to know what a particular treatment looks like,” the spokesperson said.