A massive DDoS attack hit the servers of the European Commission for several hours

The European Commission was the victim of a massive DDoS attack that brought down its internet access for hours on Thursday.

A massive DDoS attack targeted the European Commission website, fortunately, according to an official statement from the organization the internal security team repelled the attack without damages.

The experts from the European Commission confirmed that some servers hit by the DDoS attack went offline causing an outage that lasted a few hours.

The European Commission informed internal staff of the attack via email and it explained that the malicious volume of traffic caused “the saturation of our Internet connection.”

“No data breach has occurred,” a Commission spokesperson was quoted by the Politico. “The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time.”

Employees claim Internet was down following the attacks

The attack occurred yesterday and according to an employee, the internal staff was not able to work during the afternoon.

“no one could work this afternoon, since the Internet was gone twice, for several hours.” said the source.

At the time I was writing there are no technical details of the DDoS attack, the responsible is still unknown neither the motivation of the offensive.

The European Commission is currently investigating the case.

Insiders confirmed that security experts at the European Commission  expected new waves of cyber attacks in the coming days. The European cyber emergency response team (CERT-EU) was already alerted and it is working with the IT security team at the European Commission to repeal any attack.

The aforementioned source notes that in addition to the traffic that hackers submitted to the EU website, the Commission also experienced attacks specifically aimed at network gateways, and this is the main reason that caused Internet connections used by employees to go down.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – European Commission, DDoS)