Hungarian websites suffered defacing, political cyber-attacks!

With the launch of the Russian military campaign against Ukraine, many experts believed that a large portion of the attacks would be waged online, attacking Europe and shutting down important internet-connected infrastructures and other aspects of societies.

Cyber-apocalypse

Although the situation is not as grim as many experts believed, or in other words, the long-theorised “cyber-Armageddon” has not been launched yet, the number of cyber-attacks and hacking attempts had gone up significantly, Forbes reports.

It was expected, since the well-known hacker group, Anonymous has announced at the beginning of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine that they would attack Russia and seize sensitive information.

Anonymous has kept its promise and managed to break into many important Russian establishments. The hacker group proudly proclaimed their successful attacks and made compromising information available to the public.

Hacking Hungary

As Syspeace reported, the overall number of automated hacking attempts has decreased by 15% in the world, yet the number of these attempts has significantly grown in Hungary.

“The sum total of automated hacking attempts on Windows servers in Hungary built up throughout the previous 14-day period. According to evidence from Syspeace-secured Windows Servers, there was an escalation of 34 percent in automated hacking attempts per server,” – they said.

On Monday, a relatively serious hacker attack was carried out successfully ‘defacing’ several Hungarian websites. Reports say that while some of them were pro-government news outlets, others were innocent bystanders which have happened to be accessible to the attackers.

Telex writes that while the attack hit some pro-government websites, some of the most popular ones have been unscathed, but others were changed to read “This website is part of the government propaganda media! We have brought the truth to you! Independent press instead of propaganda!”.

Some speculate that there must have been Hungarians among the attackers since the messages were written in proper Hungarian without the use of Google Translate, and the background knowledge of the hackers about Hungarian political life also supports this.

The attackers said that they are from the Anonymous hacker group, and while they were trying to devalue the current Hungarian government, during the last week of the election campaign period, this attack might have triggered the opposite reaction.

“I do not think that this attack is acceptable as a protest action, because it caused a lot of collateral damage, which I find malicious. Like Russian missiles, it does not matter if they hit a barrack or a family house,”

– Tamás Kocsis, a cyber security expert told Telex.

It is currently unknown who is truly be behind this action and the scope of the attack. It seems most likely, that the hackers have managed to hit a single server that hosted these websites and hacked into every single one, despite some having no government relation, however, if it is true, they could have found other, sensitive information.