Europol-led global operation takes down pro-Russian cybercrime network
‘NoName057(16)’ group, which targeted Ukraine and its allies with DDoS attacks, had its infrastructure disrupted across more than a dozen nations
A coordinated international operation has hit the infrastructure of a pro-Russian cybercrime network linked to a string of denial of service attacks targeting Ukraine and its allies, the European Union’s police agency Europol announced Wednesday.
Code-named Eastwood, the operation targeted the so-called NoName057(16) group, which was identified last month by Dutch authorities as being behind a series of denial-of-service attacks on several municipalities and organisations linked to a Nato summit in the Netherlands.
Europol said that the cybercrime network was also involved in attacks in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland.
The police agency said the international operation “led to the disruption of an attack-infrastructure consisting of over one hundred computer systems worldwide, while a major part of the group’s central server infrastructure was taken offline”.
Law enforcement and judicial authorities from France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the United States took simultaneous actions against offenders and infrastructure belonging to the pro-Russian cybercrime network, it said.
Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks, sabotage attempts and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine, including cyberattacks.
