"Italian Police Repel Online Attempt to Disrupt Eurovision"

The Italian police are said to have foiled a cyberattack on the Eurovision music contest, which was allegedly carried out by the pro-Russian threat group Killnet with the goal of disrupting the spectator voting process to determine the winner. Due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it was not permitted to compete this year. Killnet, in a Telegram message, denies any involvement and threatens retaliation for the accusation despite saying it had "perhaps" targeted Eurovision with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. According to foreign media, the group has "declared war" on Italy and nine other countries. The Mirai botnet was employed in the attack, based on posts made by the group on Telegram. The botnet has previously been used in large-scale DDoS attacks. The number of requests per second attained in the DDoS attack was 10 billion, according to a separate Killnet message on Telegram. Killnet also claims that Italy will soon be targeted by more attacks and that the strikes are aimed at boosting the country's cyber skills. According to reports, the Italian authorities thwarted two cyberattacks on Eurovision. The first attack occurred during the semifinal, and the second attack was during the final. A recent series of DDoS attacks against government sites in Italy was revealed by Italy's Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) just days before the last attack on Eurovision. However, the DDoS tactics utilized in this campaign were not the same as the most typical volumetric DDoS attacks, which saturate the victim's bandwidth capacity. This method is called an HTTP DDoS attack. It is an application-type attack that leverages HTTP GET requests to overwhelm the available connections of a web server. This article continues to discuss the cyberattacks on the Eurovision music competition, the suspected perpetrators behind the attacks, a recent wave of slow HTTP DDoS attacks against Italian government sites, and suggested mitigation measures. 

DataBreachToday reports "Italian Police Repel Online Attempt to Disrupt Eurovision"