Nine hospitals in Denmark were hit by distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on 27 February, which caused their websites to go offline. Anonymous Sudan, a group whose user location is listed as Russia, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The group cited “Quran burnings” as the reason for the action, referring to an incident in which a copy of the holy book was set alight in Stockholm in front of the Turkish embassy.
Anonymous Sudan is not part of the authentic Anonymous movement but is instead likely to be part of a Russian information operation aimed at complicating Sweden’s NATO application, according to cybersecurity company Truesec.
The DDoS traffic was generated by a cluster of 61 paid servers, which were hosted in Germany by IBM/Softlayer. The group has started using botnets, according to a post on its Telegram account, following the closure of the servers.
The attacks on the hospitals did not affect medical care, according to Copenhagen’s health authority. The sites were down for a couple of hours, before being brought back online.
The Anonymous Sudan group had previously claimed responsibility for an attack on Scandinavian Airlines and one on national public television broadcaster SVT.
A Swedish national security officer has suggested that the responses to the Quran burning incident, both in Russian media and in the form of activist responses, had been planned before the incident took place, indicating that preparations had been made for retaliation.
