The UEFA Euro 2024 soccer championship event kicked off final weekend, however followers of European nationwide groups aren’t the one ones paying consideration. Cyberattackers took intention at Polish public tv, TVP, disrupting its on-line broadcast of Poland’s Group D opening match in opposition to the Netherlands.
The broadcaster decided that the assault was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) effort that was timed for the beginning of the match.
“At about 3 p.m., Polish Tv recorded a DDoS assault carried out from IP addresses situated in Poland,” TVP stated in a assertion on social platform X (by way of Google Translate). “After lower than a minute, we took motion in collaboration with nationwide operators, which led to a mitigation of the assault. The IT groups have restored the service.”
An Unintentional Crash, or Russian Harrying?
Bartłomiej Wypartowicz, editor at Jap European cybersecurity outlet Defence 24, shortly raised the chance that the incident may not have been malicious; greater than half of the inhabitants in Poland reportedly tried to entry the stream, and the group accountable for almost all of the visitors seems to be a professional group referred to as “followers of the Polish nationwide group on Sunday after lunch.”
He posted on X, “Thousands and thousands of IP addresses need to go to the location” (by way of Google Translate).
Nonetheless, Pawel Olszewski, Poland’s deputy minister of digital affairs, stated in an interview with native media yesterday that the crash was actually malicious, and sure backed by Russia, which needed to “forestall Polish residents from watching the match on-line.”
Cybercriminals have a protracted historical past of attacking main world sporting occasions — from the now-infamous Russia-led Olympic Destroyer assaults in opposition to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, to tried disruptions to the 2022 UEFA World Cup in Qatar, to threats in opposition to the upcoming Summer season Video games in Paris.
On this case, “all leads result in the Russian Federation,” Olszewski instructed Radio RMF24 (by way of Google Translate). “It was a DDoS assault aimed toward disabling the service. … This assault was repelled in a short time.”
