Publicly disclosed information for this event

Index Number:

Title:

2023_109

The website of the Ministry of Defence is victim of a denial of service attack claimed by a [...]

Day	Month	Year	Country	Activity	Incident Type
20	May	2023	United Arab Emirates	Defence	Denial of Service

Summary

The victim, a fovernment entity from the UAE, is a claimed by a hacktivist group as having been targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack during a campain targeting multiple government websites of the victim. The claim came forth on 20th May 2023, accompanied by evidence shared on the actor’s Telegram post to validate the successful execution of the DDoS attack. This proof was in the form of links to a utility platform that confirms the real-time availability and responsiveness of a domain or IP address.

According to sources, the aforementioned hacktivist group has a history of leveraging DDoS attacks against institutions and governmental infrastructures. The motivation behind such attacks often stems from political issues, with other groups like 'Anonymous Sudan' showing parallels in their targeting patterns, particularly influenced by geopolitical circumstances.

Victim

UAE Ministry of Defence

Claimed/Reported Threat Actor

Mysterious Team Bangladesh

Origin

Hacktivism

Main impact

Availability

Recommendations to Defence to reduce Denial of Service risks:

Implement rate limiting and traffic filtering to mitigate the impact of incoming malicious traffic.
Check with your IT service provider that the resilience of its systems against such attack was tested.
Regularly monitor network traffic and set up alerting for unusual patterns or spikes.
Diversify your server locations and use fail-over systems to ensure service availability in case of an attack.
Establish an incident response plan to quickly mitigate and recover from DoS attacks.

Files generated on Monday, 11th December 2023.
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