Agent 007 would never put up with this type of attack. MI5’s website was down for part of 30 September after a possible cyber-attack. The UK’s security service public site was briefly unavailable for intermittent periods in the morning but is now back online, with the incident resolved.[1] Quick action by the new cyber “agents.”
Pro-Russian hackers allegedly attacked MI5’s public website, briefly causing it to go offline as the Ukrainian conflict continued to escalate. A group called Anonymous Russia claimed responsibility for the outage publishing records showing server errors at around 9am UK local time.[2] The cause of the problem is being looked at but was considered to be a minor outage, the UK’s PA news agency reported.
The website is believed to have been subject to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which seeks to disrupt a site by flooding it with web traffic in a bid to try and knock it offline. DDoS is a common form of cyber-attack used by a wide range of perpetrators, the nature of which makes it difficult to attribute responsibility to a particular group. It is understood no sensitive information was held on or connected to the website and no data was lost.
On 30 September, a security source said the website was “intermittently unavailable this morning and is now back online”, adding: “As is standard when this happens, the information members of the public might need to report anything suspicious was clearly displayed instead of the usual homepage.”
Anonymous has been around for quite sometime in the cyber world. Often, analysts and investigators are not sure what “side” Anonymous hackers are working from. Many believe that hackers use Anonymous as an alias when conducting cyber- attacks.[3] Did Anonymous Russia attack MI5? The modern day James Bond will likely find out.
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[1] https://news.yahoo.com/mi5-website-briefly-knocked-offline-155529787.html
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/russian-cyber-attacks-mi5-anonymous-b2184446.html
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/anonymous-internet-group.asp
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