NoName057(16)’s mascot shows their identification with the Russian bear

HBC website brought down by cyber attack again

Hastings Borough Council’s main website  was put out of operation on Thursday 5 December, by a repeat attack from the same pro Russia hacktivist group which brought it down temporarily in late October. Nick Terdre reports, research by Russell Hall.

The HBC website became unavailable on the morning of Thursday 5 December, and was restored to action on Friday morning, when the council said, “We will be looking into this further with central government and our suppliers.”

Meanwhile the MyHastings website continued to operate normally. The two websites are hosted by different service providers, the main one by Claranet via its London gateway.

As on the previous occasion, the attack came from a pro Russia hacktivist group, NoName057(16), which also attacked the websites of many other councils and other public bodies.

HBC issued a statement on Thursday afternoon, in which it stated: “Hastings Borough Council, along with many other council and national government websites over the previous few days, have been subject to a further Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by a Russian ‘hacktivist’ group.

“The council put measures in place after the previous incident in October, however this is a persistent attempt by this group to disrupt government websites. We are working with central government and our suppliers on a permanent solution to these attacks. We emphasise that no personal data is at risk due to this attack.”

DDoS attacks work by flooding a website with requests and overwhelming its capacity to respond, thus causing it to crash.

Sir Richard Moore, head of MI6

NoName057(16) again attributed its action to the UK’s continuing support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, this time citing the further supply of Storm Shadow missiles to Kyiv and their use in recent strikes on Russian territory. They also claim motivation from a speech given in Paris on 29 November by Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6, in which he praised Britain’s intelligence partnerships with France and the US.

A post on X by NoName057(16) states: “According to Bloomberg, a few weeks ago London delivered ‘dozens’ of long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Kiev. These are the first such deliveries under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but they have not been publicly announced…

“As the British authorities continue to support Kiev, we begin to dismantle their internet infrastructure brick by brick,” they stated in a separate post.

Although Claranet is responsible for security on the websites it hosts, the success of the DDoS attack raises the question whether HBC – and other targets – were sufficiently diligent in ensuring their providers’ capability to withstand such attacks before contracting their services.

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