The cybercriminal group calling itself NoName057, known for its actions in favor of the Kremlin’s geopolitical positions, has claimed responsibility this Friday for several cyberattacks against the official pages of Spanish public institutions. According to what they claim, they have come to knock down the portals of the Moncloa, the Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation, the National Cybersecurity Institute (Incibe) and several local administrations in Granada, such as the City Council, the Tourism Office or the Metro.
At this time, the pages of the Nasrid city’s institutions are the only ones that remain out of service. elDiario.es is not aware that the central government portals have become inoperative at any time. Incibe has confirmed that the wave of cyberattacks has caused “small availability outages in web portals”, but that “the perfect functioning of all essential operators has been guaranteed.”
NoName057 has justified the attack on Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Spain. “He went to the Spanish city of Granada to meet with the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, in order to discuss the supply of Hawk anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine,” they say on his Telegram channel. The Hawk missile launchers are manufactured by the US, they have capabilities for detecting, identifying, tracking and destroying aerial targets at medium and low altitude, with a range of 40 km.
This is a system in service since 1962 and is at the end of its useful life. Spain sent several of them to Ukraine in November 2022 and has committed to sending another six launchers to Kiev at the meeting that the leaders of the 27 members of the EU held in Granada, to which the president attended as a guest. Ukrainian.
“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!”, the group ironically stated. Denial of service (or DDoS) attacks consist of collapsing access to digital services through an avalanche of requests for information. NoName07 carries them out with its own tools and “borrowing” the equipment of its supporters, who can install a computer program so that their devices make these requests for information when the group orders it.
DDoS attacks are a very simple variant of cyberattack, popularized by hacktivist groups in the early 2010s. Although they can be used as a smokescreen for actions such as information theft, by themselves their only effect is to take down web pages and other digital services.
It is not the first campaign of the NoName057 group in Spain. At the end of July they claimed responsibility for an attack campaign that took down the pages of several media outlets. On that occasion they also justified their action by the military collaboration between Spain and Ukraine.
