The pro-Russia hacker group Noname 057(16) announced via the Telegram messaging service that it was behind a series of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the Finnish parliament's website on Tuesday.
The DoS attacks on parliament's website come as Finland prepares to join the Nato military alliance at a ceremony in Brussels. The group is also believed to be behind a similar attack on at least one other official website as well as the personal website of outgoing Finnish PM Sanna Marin (SDP).
"Finland will today become the 31st member state of the Nato military alliance. <...> We are sending Finland to Nato, accompanied by denial of service attacks," the group wrote on Telegram.
Finnish Parliament confirmed the incident in a short statement released on Tuesday afternoon, noting that it was working with the National Cyber Security Centre to limit the effects of the attack.
Although the hacker group has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Parliament's website, they did acknowledge any role in a seemingly similar attack on the website of state-owned agency VTT (the Technical Research Centre of Finland) — which also experienced problems on Tuesday.
Noname 057(16) previously claimed to have carried out a DoS attack on the Finnish parliament's website in August 2022, and the group is known to be behind similar attacks on government agencies, media, and private company websites in Ukraine, the US and other European countries.
Denial of service attacks occur when a website is flooded with traffic or send information that causes it to crash.