Russian hackers take down official Spanish websites

The Russian hacker group 'NoName057' reported on its Telegram account that it managed to take down Spanish government websites during the country's general elections, including that of the Ministry of the Interior.

Local media confirmed that the website was inoperative for about four hours, starting at 4 pm. They also explained that the hack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. "In a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an attacker overloads his target with unwanted Internet traffic so that normal traffic does not reach its intended destination," according to a specialist from the company Akami.

The National Cryptologic Center, a government agency, is investigating the cyberattacks, according to Spanish newspaper El Confidencial. ‘NoName057' is their main suspect.

The motive doesn’t seem to be related to changing the election results, according to the same source, but to discredit the results. He further argued that Vladimir Putin's administration is likely behind the attacks that began last Thursday.

Another one of the websites that 'NoName057' allegedly took down was that of the Post Office. This is not the first incident it experienced throughout this election cycle.