Pro-Russian group Killnet launched DDoS attacks on Romanian govt sites

A series of DDoS attacks launched by Russian hacktivists are targeting several Romanian government websites.

The Romanian national cyber security and incident response team, DNSC, warns of a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting government websites. The attacks have started on April 29, 2022, at 04:00.

The attacks were allegedly launched by Pro-Russian group Killnet, below is the list of targeted websites:

gov.ro (Romania’s Government)mapn.ro (Ministry of Defense)politiadefrontiera.ro (Romanian Border Police)cfrcalatori.ro (Romania’s National Railway Transport Company)otpbank.ro (commercial bank operating in Romanian) 

The website of the DNSC is currently unreachable, but it is not clear if it was hit by a DDoS attack too.

Other Romanian agencies are investigating the attacks, below is the statement published by the Romanian Intelligence Service.

“Following the investigations carried out by the CYBERINT National Center within the Romanian Intelligence Service, it was established that the cyber attackers used network equipment from outside Romania. The attackers took control of the equipment in question by exploiting cyber security vulnerabilities, respectively the lack of cyber security measures and used them as a vector of attack on sites in Romania.” reads the announcement published by the Romanian Intelligence Service.

The pro-Russian Eastern KILLNET group, who claimed the responsibility for the attacks, this month launched DDoS attacks on the sites of institutions in states such as the USA, Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, but also on NATO sites.

The DNSC shared indicators of compromise for these attacks and published guidelines to mitigate them.

This week, Ukraine ‘s computer emergency response team (CERT-UA) announced that it is investigating, along with the National Bank of Ukraine (CSIRT-NBU), ongoing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks targeting pro-Ukraine sites and the government web portal.

The attacks originated from compromised websites, most of them use the WordPress CMS. Threat actors planted a malicious JavaScript code, tracked as BrownFlood, in the web pages of the sites to generate the malicious traffic to a list of static URLs included in the JavaScript code.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, KillNet)