Pro-Kremlin Hackers Claim To Be Responsible For DDos Attacks On The Site Of The European Parliament

Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament. (photo: twitter @EP_President)

JAKARTA - A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility for a denial of service (DDoS) attack on the European Parliament website after its lawmakers appointed Russia as a sponsoring state of terrorism, the agency president said on Wednesday.

"European parliament is under advanced cyber attacks. A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility," said Roberta Metsola in a tweet, Wednesday, November 23.

"Our IT experts are against it & protecting our system. This is, after we proclaimed Russia as a sponsoring country of terrorism. My response: SlavaUkraini (reliance to Ukraine)", he said.

Earlier on Wednesday, lawmakers voted to declare Russia a sponsoring state of terrorism, citing Moscow's military attacks on civilian targets such as energy infrastructure, hospitals, schools and shelters violating international law.

This move is largely symbolic, as the European Union does not have a legal framework to support it. At the same time, the bloc has imposed unprecedented sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

"The availability of the @Europarl_EN website is currently influenced from the outside due to the high traffic of external networks. This traffic is related to the DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack," said EU Parliament spokesman Jaume Duch in a tweet.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks work by directing high internet traffic volumes to servers targeted by "hackers" to make them offline.