GRANADA, Spain (Reuters) – Spain’s government said on Friday several public and private websites, including in the city of Granada where an EU summit is taking place, were targeted in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that was claimed by pro-Russian hackers.
In a statement, it said all services were back to normal after minor outages and it had reinforced surveillance and security measures “after the wave of cyber attacks suffered by different Spanish institutions coinciding with the informal summit” of European Union leaders.
The Granada Bus service app was one of the entities affected, it said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
DDoS attacks work by directing high volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid to knock them offline.
The NoName hacking group, which claimed on the Telegram messaging service to have been behind the cyberattacks in Spain, often resorts to such actions against countries supporting Ukraine’s efforts to fend off the Russian invasion.
In its post it did not mention the EU summit but did refer to talks held in Granada on Thursday between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Spanish acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who offered Kyiv six HAWK air defence systems.
“It seems that the Spanish segment of the Internet has been waiting for our visit, so we are in a hurry to attack it with long-range DDoS missiles!” it added.
The NoName group said its attacks had affected several Spanish government websites, the Granada metro, its bus service and the city tourism portal.
(Reporting by Belen Carreno and Andrei Khalip; Editing by Gareth Jones)
