Posted on September 27, 2018 at 3:51 PM
German Energy Company RWE Attacked by DDoS
There are several protesters camped in Germany’s Hambach Forest where RWE is set to commence coal mining. While the protest is ongoing, reports have it that the German company’s website has come under DDoS attack.
Protesters Stay on RWE’s Neck
Deutsche Welle was the first to report that some unknown attackers have launched a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) on RWE’s website. This attacker was said to have held the site hostage as it were throughout the whole of Tuesday. Save for the German’s website, no other site came under such attack for the day.
Police have been working month round to disperse protesters from the Forest but they have insisted they would embark on a more aggressive protest in days to come. The reason for this stiff protest is that they want to prevent RWE from going ahead with its coal mining expansion.
To this effect, many of the protesters have made the forest their homes for some days now. And beyond their refusal to leave the woods, they have gone to the YouTube to make their position known concerning the matter. A report made available last week quoted the protesters as a warning that:
If you don’t immediately stop the clearing of the Hambach Forest, we will attack your servers and bring down your web pages, causing you economic damage that you will never recover from. Together, we will bring RWE to its knees. This is our first and last warning.
That warning which had in it some elements of threat was said to have been dropped in a video by an unknown protester’s voice.
DDoS Attacks Cripple Websites
Most DDoS attacks on websites render them completely inactive. And the fact that protesters flagrantly despised the police to stage their protest against RWE helped the protesters to make good on their threat.
A security expert at Corero Network, Andrew Llyod has lamented the level of damage that is likely to be recorded should the attack get out of hand. According to him, “RWE is an operator of an essential service (energy) in Germany. The lights didn’t go out but their public-facing website was offline as a result of this attack.”
Some earlier reports from researchers at Corero have established that once a website faces a DDoS attack, at least a one out of five organizations should expect such attacks again 24 hours from that time.
