DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status

Posted by e12e 3 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by lschueller 55 minutes ago

I'd guess someone in the us fat-fingered ip ranges and mixed up 2.144.0.0/14 (Iran) with 2.148.0.0/14 (Norway)

Comment by TacticalCoder 37 minutes ago

Or someone entered 2.144.0.0/14 but on a machine without ECC and a bit-flip happened, turning it into 2.148.0.0/14.

Comment by just_some_user 2 hours ago

The actual interesting part about such an attack is not that something is down, but rather why someone would run it. A lot of DDoS originates from script kiddies, but such attacks are usually very short lived as attacks are expensive. So which actor would actually benefit from downing the Norwegian government?

Comment by Retr0id 2 hours ago

DDoS tends to be monetised as DDoS-as-a-service. Taking down "significant" services is good advertising. Either that, or they plan to extort the Norwegian government.

Comment by just_some_user 2 hours ago

But for such a "proof of power" a short attack which takes the service down once is enough, long attacks are not so common and actually require some work from the attacker

Comment by Retr0id 2 hours ago

If the attack doesn't last long, bystanders can't know whether it was trivially mitigated by the victim.

A shorter attack won't make as many news headlines, either.

Comment by devin 2 hours ago

Unless part of the social proof is that mitigation is more difficult.

Comment by roflmaostc 2 hours ago

is there actually any source those attacks are really done by "script kiddies"?

More likely this more politically motivated and backed up by money and more capable groups

Comment by just_some_user 2 hours ago

Yes, thats what I meant

Comment by giwook 2 hours ago

Probably a country that lost to Norway in the World Cup.

Comment by InTheArena 2 hours ago

What do they benefit from taking down any government, NGO or civic work program? American systems, as well as larger European systems are constantly attacked. I've seen the same traffic. Fire walling off China, North Korea and smaller eastern European countries is a must if you ever plan to expose any internet exposed services.

Comment by cantalopes 2 hours ago

Imo russia most likely

Comment by cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago

Really, you have no one in mind? Someone who is sending hundreds of bombing drones daily to Ukraine, killing civilian population, women and children, and who is eager to send a message to NATO countries any way possible?

Comment by motbus3 2 hours ago

That is much less effective than every other manner they tested on the past few years such as shadow fleets, ghost satellites etc.

Up to the moment it has not been the operation adopted which would make it weird.

On who would do it then, anyone who benefits from instability. From corporations trying to sell flocked uped sytems, politicians, etc.

There is one south american country who was attacked exactly this way before their head of the government was kidnapped.

Comment by cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago

You don't understand Kremlin's mentality. Any even little nasty thing they can do to the West makes them giggle like Doctor Evil. "Oh, a NATO country's government infra was not protected from DDoS? Let's have fun, haha!" You are dealing with story book villains. I know, this sounds so ridiculous it's hard to believe someone can actually be like this. But then the reality check hits.

Comment by throwaway742 6 minutes ago

They aren't story book villains. I think this says a lot about your mentality.

Comment by inigyou 19 minutes ago

I didn't know Israel was supplying drones to Ukraine

Comment by esseph 1 hour ago

It hasn't been majorly like that in twenty years.

Botnets are services now, a business. They gain customers by their effectiveness and resilience.

For $$50-100 you can deny service to a lot of big sites and services.

Comment by inigyou 19 minutes ago

I've seen people say this but no proof of it. Could I really take down Stack Overflow for $50? Oh wait, it took itself down for free.

Comment by iwontberude 2 hours ago

those script kiddies control botnets in foreign countries and use them to attack stuff just bc. its not their compute, so no marginal cost to them

Comment by tuatoru 2 hours ago

The UK. It wants to steal Norway's vast stores of electricity.

Comment by Crunchified 2 hours ago

"vast stores of electricity"?

Comment by QuantumNomad_ 2 hours ago

Electricity production in Norway is predominantly hydroelectric.

When it rains dams fill up. The water is drained into shafts with turbines, and electricity is generated.

However, even though we are big on hydroelectricity percentage wise I’m not sure it’s all that vast an amount of electricity on a global scale. We are a pretty small country after all.

According to Wikipedia, the Norwegian electricity sector had 40.26 GW installed capacity as of 2021 and was producing 157.113 TWh in the same year. [1]

Great Britain had 74.8 GW installed capacity in 2023 and was producing 292.7 TWh in 2023. [2]

France was producing 537.7 TWh in 2020. [3]

Germany was producing 488.5 TWh in 2024. [4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_in_Great_Britain

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

Comment by Crunchified 1 hour ago

It stored energy. It's not stored electricity.

Comment by aaron695 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by speerer 1 hour ago

There's some interesting commentry at https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322754/20260803/norway-id... , which suggests that the widespread outage is due to a single point of failure:

> ID-Porten: When One Gateway Controls Everything

> At the center of the disruption is ID-porten — the national login gateway operated by Norway's Digitaliseringsdirektoratet (Digdir), the government agency responsible for public-sector digitalization. ID-porten functions as the single sign-on portal through which Norwegian citizens authenticate themselves to access public digital services.

It seems to be a corporate service provider that's a dependency for many other services.

Comment by 39 minutes ago

Comment by p0w3n3d 3 hours ago

There has been also DDoS against my friend's employer ISP. He had to work a lot to mitigate. There was a random request before

Comment by spapas82 2 hours ago

Would the attack be successful is the Norwegian government used a way to protect itself against ddos like cloudflare or akamai?

Comment by inigyou 18 minutes ago

I certainly hope the Norwegian government doesn't force all of its citizens to transmit all of their private data to the US government.

Comment by leke 2 hours ago

The bus card ride purchase system was down today in my part of Finland. I wonder if it is related.

Comment by kachnuv_ocasek 2 hours ago

Bets on which AI lab it is this time?

Comment by AtNightWeCode 2 hours ago

Many important services with problems. Ouch. My guess is that the root cause is misconfiguration rather than an attack.

Comment by crest 1 hour ago

<hat type="tinfoil">I wonder who wants the Norwegian gov infrastructure between a TLS terminating proxy service</hat>

Comment by roschdal 2 hours ago

The Internet was supposed to withstand a nuclear attack

Comment by buildbot 2 hours ago

"The internet" is currently fine, besides Norwegian government services.

Also something designed to withstand something does not imply it survives other somethings.

Comment by pprotas 2 hours ago

Guess a nuclear attack would actually lessen the load on the global internet, rather than increase it - like a DDOS would!

Comment by vee-kay 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by nubg 2 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by motbus3 2 hours ago

Could be, but it does not look like any of the ways they done before. Anyone who benefits from instability would be at win, from internal political competition, foreign companies trying to sell flocked up systems and the list could be huge.

Not saying it was not who you think it was, Im just saying it does not have enough information yet to be the only explanation or at least the most obvious one.

Comment by cyanydeez 2 hours ago

could just be openai.

Comment by coffinbirth 2 hours ago

Your comment is dumb and disgusting. You're comparing Putin with Hitler, thereby showing that you don't know that relatives of Putin were killed by Hitler's troops, e.g. his brother during the siege of Leningrad (1+ million civilians killed), his grandmother was killed as a civilian, his uncles perished during frontline service and his father was severely wounded[1].

By the way, numerous high ranking German politicians regularly also do this kind of comparison, showing the lack of knowledge about the history of their own country. Can anyone show me JUST A SINGLE MEMORIAL in Germany for the 20+ million (lower bound estimate) people killed on the eastern front? Yes, there is one in the heart of Berlin, which the Soviets built in 1945!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_Vladimir_Putin

Comment by CursedSilicon 2 hours ago

Whispers

Hey, hey

Did you know

Multiple things can in fact, be bad

Comment by coffinbirth 2 hours ago

I immediately knew that you are an U.S. American, because of you total lack of knowledge about European history. It's always the same old story, Americans and their lack of education about global topics.

Comment by rcxdude 1 hour ago

This is a non-sequitur.

Comment by CursedSilicon 1 hour ago

Australian but go off :)

Comment by matkoniecz 1 hour ago

As someone from Poland I want to confirm that multiple things can be in fact bad.

Being invaded by Nazi Germany and days later by their ally, Russia was example of such case.

Comment by justsomehnguy 1 hour ago

As someone from Poland you are conveniently ignore what your country did years before that.

-webster.com/dictionary/polonization

Comment by matkoniecz 1 hour ago

At no point I claimed that Poland was land of saints and cuddly plush bears. See also Bereza Kartuska.

What you linked does not change at all that being invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union was absolutely awful and both were clearly evil.

(and if you want to start oppression olympics, then yes: what Germany and Russia did was far worse than what Poland did, for that matter what Ukrainian OUN UPA did was far worse than what Poland did)

Comment by justsomehnguy 1 hour ago

It hurts what you actually was on the same level but got the short end, eh?

Comment by indemnity 2 hours ago

Maybe you should stop invading other countries if these comparisons hurt your feelings buddy.

Comment by coffinbirth 2 hours ago

I always find it unbelievable how people do not know or just forget about what happened in the east 85 years ago. Really sad. This is one of the primary reasons why people in the west don't understand why Russia cannot accept Ukraine in NATO. It was NATO that expanded to the east, contrary to the agreements after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

Comment by anon48293 2 hours ago

Ukraine sought NATO membership AFTER Russia attacked in 2014, not before.

Since you’re such a history buff, what did Russia promise when Ukraine got rid of their nukes?

Comment by coffinbirth 1 hour ago

> Ukraine got rid of their nukes

Russia is the official successor state of the Soviet Union, the nukes never belonged to Ukraine in the first place. It was Ukraine that first attacked LPR and DPR in 2014. It was Ukraine that forbid Russian language, culture, church, etc... to Russians living in eastern Ukraine. By the way, Odessa will return to Russia.

Comment by anon48293 55 minutes ago

Answer the question. What did Russia state in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances?

Comment by justsomehnguy 1 hour ago

> NATO Action Plan membership (Georgia and Ukraine) 4 April 2008

Sure, sure a fresh "anon" account.

Comment by SukadarBukadar 1 hour ago

Let me tell you what's actually "really sad": Bucha as a response to sovereign country's attempt to join NATO. Having a hostile country as a neighbour isn't an excuse for starting a war with it.

Comment by coffinbirth 1 hour ago

Following this logic Mexico and Canada can both join a military alliance with China and Russia, I guess the U.S. must accept that, both are sovereign country's after all...

Comment by matkoniecz 1 hour ago

And if in response USA would invade and start massacring civilians (like Russia did), that would be in fact evil.

Comment by antonvs 1 hour ago

> Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

Russia, as a hostile nation not interested in participating in global peace, doesn’t get to decide such things.

Comment by matkoniecz 2 hours ago

> what happened in the east 85 years ago

Russia got attacked by their ally, Nazi Germany. After 87 years ago in 1939 they invaded together Poland.

> Really sad.

Yeah, Russia going on to win WW II was quite sad. Admittedly better than Nazis winning but pity they have not both lost.

> contrary to the agreements after the fall of the Soviet Union

which supposed agreements? Were they any more binding than Budapest Memorandum?

> Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

And Russia in Ukraine is unacceptable for us.