A recent report notes that the ministries of foreign affairs and defense in Finland were disconnected after a denial of service (DoS) attack. Via Twitter, representatives from both agencies confirmed the incident, adding that the affected services have already been restored and security measures will be taken to prevent further incidents.
“For the time being, we will keep the Department of Defense website closed until the harmful traffic on the website is gone”, reads one of Finland government tweets.
It all started this morning, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland posted on Twitter: “There are currently interruptions in the online services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sites http://Um.fi and Finlanabroad.fi have been attacked with a denial of service variant. We will investigate and try to get the services up and running as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
At 14:06 (Finland time), the Finnish government’s official Twitter account confirmed that these issues had already been addressed and that the websites of both ministries had resumed operations: “The attack is over. Due to the protections on these platforms, most of the sites continued to operate normally during the incident.”
For now there is no information available about the perpetrators of the attack, although it is most likely that the authorities are linking this incident with activity of Russian hacking groups. Just a few hours ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a message to the Finnish government via video regarding the conflict with Russia. Other reports mention that Finland’s government is considering applying to NATO, a move the Russian government opposes.
Finland’s Defense Ministry also claimed that Russian state jets have committed various violations of its airspace, which could indicate what the target behind these attacks has been.
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