The European Commission servers were forced to go offline for hours on Thursday after suffering a series of large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. However the Commission confirmed about this attack and claimed that its security teams responded well, so no disruption was caused.
The Commission’s IT services sent an email to staff around 6 p.m. which described the attack as a “denial of service … which resulted in the saturation of our internet connection”.
There was no data breach and also there was no service interruption but one staff member revealed they couldn’t access the Internet for hours after the attack. It is found that the attacks began around 3 p.m on Thursday directed at the European Commission’s website and network gateways by sending millions of requests per second blocking Internet access for the staff.
For now the group of hackers who launched the attacks is not yet known, but the European Commission says that the EU’s cyber emergency response team (CERT-EU) has already started an investigation and will share more information at a later time. However now the European Commission’s website is restored,reachable and works fine.