Government Website COMPROMISED – Hackers Take Control!
(UnitedVoice.com) – Cyberattacks have become a major security issue in the United States. Criminals have targeted critical infrastructure, private companies, and government institutions. Most recently, a website for Congress experienced an attack.
At about 10 p.m. on Thursday, July 7, Congress.gov went down. Messages that read “Error 522” or “Connection timed out” greeted users who visited the website. The site was back up and running at 10:45 p.m. for some people with no impact on individual congressional websites.
A pro-Russian cybercrime group attacked the https://t.co/71kt4dKctR web domain Thursday, resulting in temporary down time that “briefly affected public access,” the Library of Congress told @AJVicens Friday. https://t.co/hYETi3LW6I
— CyberScoop (@CyberScoopNews) July 8, 2022
According to reports, the pro-Russia hacking group Killnet took credit for the attacks. The internet saboteurs specialize in denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. That’s when a hacker overwhelms a website’s servers with a flood of internet traffic. When done successfully, it effectively causes a cyberspace traffic jam for the website under attack. While those types of attacks are fairly common online, it’s significant that the group was able to take down a .gov website for almost an hour.
Killnet also reportedly targeted many other countries, including Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Norway, and Latvia. The latter experienced its biggest cyberattack in history.
As for the attack on America, CyberScoop reported the group posted a message about it on its Telegram channel, saying the US has “money for weapons for the whole world, but not for [its] own defense.”
Does the hacking group have a point?
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