Dutch political sites hit by DDoS as EU elections open
The 2024 European Parliament election got underway in the Netherlands on June 6, 2024, with polling continuing through June 9 across the other 26 EU member states. On election day and the day before, Cloudflare's systems detected and automatically mitigated DDoS attacks aimed at multiple politically-related Dutch internet properties. News reports attributed at least some of the attacks to a pro-Russian hacking group called HackNeT.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks work by flooding a victim's server with more traffic than it can handle, rendering websites or apps unavailable to users. Attackers frequently combine DDoS with other exploit techniques in the same campaign.
On June 5, total DDoS mitigations in the Netherlands exceeded 1 billion HTTP requests, with most traffic targeting two election- or political party websites. One of those sites saw an attack peaking at 14:00 UTC (16:00 local time) with 115 million requests per hour, lasting roughly four hours. A second politically-related site peaked at the same time with 65 million requests per hour.
The primary June 5 attack on one of the targeted sites peaked at 14:13 UTC (16:13 local time) at 73,000 requests per second (rps), continuing for several hours. Traffic ramped up gradually through the first half of the day and then stopped abruptly at 18:06. On June 6, the main attack on the second site peaked at 11:01 UTC (13:01 local time) at 52,000 rps.
Election cyberattacks follow familiar patterns
High-stakes elections and geopolitical shifts frequently spill over into the online sphere. Cloudflare's Q1 2024 DDoS threat report documented a 466% surge in DDoS attacks on Sweden after its NATO accession—a pattern also seen during Finland's NATO membership process in 2023. Real-world conflicts and contentious polls have consistently correlated with increased cyber activity, as seen following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023.
Cloudflare recommends a set of best practices for defending against DDoS attacks, including step-by-step guidance for securing applications and preventing DDoS attacks. Live traffic trends and election-specific insights are available through Cloudflare Radar's 2024 Elections Insights report, which is updated throughout the year as national elections occur.
