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An attack on the website of the British Royal Family that saw it taken down has been claimed by pro-Russian hackers.
The site, which serves as a place that shares knowledge on the workings of the Royal Family as well as news, was taken down for an hour on Sunday.
The attack was claimed by the Killnet threat group, a collective known for taking down government websites and agencies through denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Killnet claimed the attack on its Telegram site, posting a link to both the site and the check host report as proof of the outage, with the simple caption “attack on pedophiles.”
The threat group has not reported a specific motive behind the attack, but has previously expressed its distaste for British support for Ukraine.
The UK gave Ukraine £2.3bn (roughly A$4.4 billion) in 2022 and has pledged to do the same in 2023.
Additionally, the Royal Family has been very clear about its support for Ukraine, with King Charles III applauding the relationship between the two countries.
“Our alliance and our resolve are as important as ever,” said his royal highness.
“Together, we stand in resolute solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Together, we are steadfast in our determination Ukraine will triumph, and that our cherished freedoms will prevail.”
Whilst the Royal Family has not issued a statement or comment on the incident, it appears that it has adopted additional security on the site, including Cloudflare verification to prevent bots and fake traffic from bombarding the site once again.
Killnet first emerged in January last year, and typically targets governments and organisations that show support for Ukraine. Its weapon of choice is the DDoS attack, which involves bombarding a site with connection requests and packets to slow or crash its servers.
These attacsk do not typically result in stolen data or unauthorized access to systems, but can result in important sites containing information or access to infrastructure down for hours, and even days, which can have a major impact on the operations of an important service, such as a hospital.
Killnet has focused on NATO countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and has even targeted NATO itself, after it said back in February that it had stolen a number of NATO email credentials and made dating profiles on a ““gay dating portal” used in Kyiv and Moldova.
It also said it had launched a DDoS attack on NATO which it said affected 40 per cent of its network.
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