The websites of a number of Icelandic organizations have been subjected to sustained cyberattacks this week, RÚV reports. Sverrir Már Sverrisson, the network administrator of Netheimur, an IT company which hosts the websites of many Icelandic companies, said the attacks have lasted for an usually long time during recent days. The attacks also come in the wake of PM Katrín Jakobsdóttir’s announcement in March that the Icelandic government would be increasing its defence budget, with special emphasis on cyber security.
Sverrir Már says this weeks spate of service disruptions have been DDOS, or a distributed denial of service, attacks, in which tens of thousands of IP addresses are routed through the same portal, which puts strain on web servers and crashes the website under attack. “It’s like sending a thousand men through the same door at the same time,” he explained. Typically, such attacks last for roughly 15 minutes, but Sverrir said that on Thursday, the attack on Netheimur’s system lasted for over an hour.
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As a result of the attacks, Icelandic newspaper DV, which is among Netheimur’s clients, had to block all foreign readers from its website. DV also reported that the DDOS attacks led to their website being knocked out completely on several occasions. There were also disruptions on RÚV’s website on Thursday, but these were only minor and appear to have been rectified.
The DDOS cyber attacks are still being investigated.
