The official website of the Royal Family experienced a brief outage on Sunday morning due to a cyber attack, according to a report by The Telegraph. The attack did not result in any unauthorized access to the website or its content. Visitors to the URL, royal.uk, were greeted with an error message indicating a “Gateway time-out Error code 504.”
The news of the website crash quickly spread, with some reports suggesting that Russian hackers were responsible. However, it has not been confirmed whether the hackers were indeed behind the attack. The Russian hacker group Killnet claimed responsibility for the cyber attack and shared a message on the messaging app Telegram. The message included a link to the website, which provided information about the monarch and the Royal Family’s role in the UK and the Commonwealth. The hackers stated that the attack was aimed at combating pedophilia.
While these types of attacks may not cause significant damage, they can result in outages lasting for hours or even days. Fortunately, the Royal Family’s website was back up and running by midday.
According to Express.co.uk, KillMilk is the leader of Killnet, a Russian hacktivist DDoS collective. Killnet is known for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaigns and has previously targeted countries supporting Ukraine, particularly NATO countries, since the beginning of the conflict in February last year. DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a website with traffic to render it inaccessible.
Killnet has claimed responsibility for attacks on US government websites in the past and has also targeted countries that oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In November last year, Killnet claimed a cyber attack on the European Parliament’s website shortly after lawmakers labeled Moscow a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
