Belgian telecom providers Proximus and Scarlet faced temporary disruptions early Wednesday following a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattack, according to local reports. The incident occurred around 7:20 am local time, prompting immediate action from technicians at Proximus. A spokesman for the company, Fabrice Gansbeke, confirmed that while an unusual traffic surge was detected, the implemented countermeasures were effective. He noted that the most significant traffic increase was seen around 7:30 am, but the overall impact on services was “very limited” as the systems successfully withstood the volume of traffic.
The same timeframe also saw Ghent University Hospital targeted by a similar DDoS attack. This resulted in a slowdown of communication with some external systems and briefly impeded access to certain data. A DDoS attack is a cybercrime tactic where a website or online service is overwhelmed with a flood of massive, simultaneous traffic requests from multiple sources, making it temporarily inaccessible to legitimate users. It’s important to note that this type of attack focuses on service disruption and does not result in the compromise of user data.
The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 quickly took credit for the attack via a message posted on their Telegram channel, claiming they had targeted Scarlet, Proximus, and an internal portal belonging to another operator, Telenet. Telenet, however, has publicly denied that their portal was affected by the incident. This group has a history of targeting Belgium, having previously disrupted websites for four straight days ahead of the October elections last year and again targeting government websites in March.
In their claim of responsibility, the hackers explicitly linked the cyberattack to recent, provocative statements made by Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken. The Minister had suggested that NATO forces would “flatten” Moscow if Russia were to launch an attack on Brussels. The hackers used their message to caution the politician, writing, “We advise the Belgian minister not to throw such statements around,” clearly indicating the political motivation behind the disruption.
The coordinated, politically motivated DDoS attacks against critical Belgian infrastructure, including major telecom operators and a key hospital, highlight an increasing trend of cyber warfare linked to geopolitical tensions. While the immediate operational impact was quickly mitigated by the targeted organizations, these incidents serve as a significant reminder of the vulnerability of essential digital services to state-aligned or politically motivated hacker groups like NoName057.
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