Belgian government websites went offline due to a cyberattack

A DDoS attack blew the internet and Belgian government sites into a tailspin for a whole day. And the vaccine booking site was also unreachable

The Belgian federal parliament (photo: Wikipedia) On Tuesday, May 4, a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack hit Belgian government websites, taking the most of the It network and also affecting some internal systems. A DDoS attack involves overloading the affected sites so that the computer system runs out of resources and collapses. A figurative comparison can be that of a crowd of people trying to enter a stadium by passing through a single functioning turnstile: the throng of people pressing to enter will send the turnstile haywire, preventing access to the stadium.

The same happens with websites when malicious actors use bots to simulate user accesses to a particular site. In this case, it happened that users trying to access sites hosted on the Belnet network were unable to reach them and displayed error messages.

Belnet, also known as the Belgian national network for research and education, is a Belgian internet provider dedicated to public education institutions, research centers and scientific institutes, and government services. This network provides web services to federal ministries and international organizations on Belgian territory.

“Due to a DDoS attack, some Belnet customers are experiencing connectivity problems” reads the Belnet network status check page which provided updates on the service for the duration of the outage. evolution of the situation. The attack was mitigated late on Tuesday evening with the Belnet team informing users that the situation had stabilized but that the attack alarm remained high.

The sites affected by the attack include it was also the booking portal for the Covid-19 vaccine that went offline for the whole day. The Belgian authorities have launched an investigation into the incident and for the moment have not attributed the DDoS attack to any single or group of cybercriminals.


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Cybersecurity Hacker Internet globalData.fldTopic = "Cybersecurity, Hacker, Internet"

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