Cyberattack hits Danish government and defence companies

Websites of the Danish government and defence companies have been unavailable following a large-scale cyberattack on Thursday 13 November, likely launched from Russia.

As Denmark's Civil Protection Agency told French international news agency AFP, a number of Danish websites were hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which blocks access to sites by overwhelming their servers with traffic.

The agency said that "several Danish companies and websites were currently experiencing outages and operating disruptions because of DDoS attacks", adding that it is "following the situation closely" together with Denmark's military intelligence.

Danish defence group Terma also confirmed the attack. Terma spokesman Tobias Brun-Falkencrone said it is "too early to say" who is responsible. "We are well geared to handle this kind of cyberattack and acted quickly. There were no security breaches and no data was lost," he added.

The pro-Russian hacker group NoName057 claimed responsibility, saying it had targeted the website of Denmark's Ministry of Transport and the state portal Borger.dk.

Previously, pro-Russian hackers claimed responsibility for attacks on Finland's Ministry of Defence and other official websites.

Russian actors were also behind the publication of personal data of Ukrainian servicemembers, using servers located in Slovakia.