Cyberattacks repeatedly hit sites that help Dutch voters make informed choices
Online voting aids Kieskompas and Stemwijzer were the targets of several cyberattacks on Tuesday. The two sites, meant to help Dutch voters make an informed choice, were offline for large parts of the day, ANP reports.
The sites were hit by DDoS attacks, which means that large amounts of information requests are sent at the sites' servers so that they overload and the sites go offline. Kieskompas and ProDemos, the organization behind Stemwijzer, assume that these were coordinated attacks. According to Willem Blanken of Kieskompas, the attacks started at the same time.
The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and a number of specialist technicians tried to stop the attacks and are investigating, Blanken said to the news wire. So far it is clear that the sites were mostly hit with traffic from abroad. It is not yet clear who is behind the attacks.
On Sunday and Monday hundreds of Dutch sites were targeted by Turkish hacker groups, including NL Times. Some were hit with DDoS attacks, others were hijacked and had Turkish messages left on them. A number of popular Dutch Twitter accounts were also hijacked and flooded with anti-Dutch, pro-Turkey messages.
