A public alert regarding a sharp rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against public authorities in the nation was released by Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center (NKSC).
DDoS is a specific kind of cyberattack that makes hosted websites and services inaccessible to authorized users and visitors by overloading internet servers with a huge number of requests and garbage traffic. Transportation companies, banking organizations, and other sizable businesses in Lithuania reportedly experienced brief service interruptions due to these hacks.
“The NCSC urges all managers of critical information infrastructure and state information resources to take additional security measures and to follow the NCSC recommendations for protection against service disruption attacks,” advises the public notice.
System administrators are encouraged to use the suggested mitigations as the agency has supplied a link to a PDF offering comprehensive advice on protecting against all sorts of DDoS attacks employed by threat actors presently. There are currently no reports of serious issues or highly disruptive events from the nation. However, some services, such as those provided by the Lithuanian Railways, are facing problems with ticketing and customer communications.
On June 21, 2022, a Russian hacktivist gang known as “Legion – Cyber Spetsnaz RF” declared cyberwar against many Lithuanian entities in a Telegram message. Large banks, logistics corporations, internet service providers, airports, energy companies, media conglomerates, and different government and ministry websites are among the listed enterprises.
Given that these hacktivist operations rely on volunteers who employ the offered tools to generate and submit requests to the targets, the high number of listed websites may be spreading the group’s available DDoS firepower too thin. This specific set of actors is a branch of the Killnet organization, which gained notoriety for targeting the websites of the Romanian and Italian governments in April and May of 2022, respectively.
Due to the Lithuanian government’s limited goods transit ban between Russia and the Kaliningrad exclave as part of EU sanctions, Russian hackers launched DDoS strikes on Lithuanian websites. The hacktivists who support the Russian government quickly organized and launched cyberattacks on Lithuania since they believed this action to be very aggressive and unlawful.
