Russian hackers hit Polish news sites in DDoS attack

Multiple Polish news websites were knocked offline Thursday after being hit by DDoS attacks said to be instigated by Russian hackers.

Polish authorities said information gathered by the government shows the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are most likely the actions of Russian hacking groups.

Several news outlets reported being hit by DDoS attacks on Twitter, including the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and online news site wPolityce.pl.

“There is a DDoS hacking attack on the website @wPolityce_pl, resulting in temporary problems with the reception of the page,” tweeted wPolityce_pl.

“According to information obtained from @CYFRA_GOV_PL [Ministry of Digitization] Russian hacking groups are behind the attack. Other Polish portals are also attacked. We are working to resolve the issues,” the news site said.

Other Polish news organizations affected include daily newspapers Rzeczpospolita and Super Express.

"Having information that such attacks are being prepared, we immediately informed all interested editorial offices so that they had the opportunity to react to this situation," Minister of Cyber Security Janusz Cieszynski told the state-run news agency PAP.

When asked if Russian groups were behind the attacks, Cieszynski said "we have such information."

Poland has been staunch supporter of Ukraine since the Russian invasion last year.

Although Moscow consistently denies that it carries out hacking operations, critical infrastructure has been regularly targeted by Russian-backed threat actors in Warsaw and around the nation.

In 2022, Poland was hit with a cyberattack every nine minutes, according to the global IT provider Noventiq.

DDoS attacks work by directing high volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers, flooding the sites and knocking them offline.

The Russian foreign ministry has not commented on the attacks.