Massive hacker attacks on websites after match with Albania

BELGRADE - After the abandonment of a football match between Serbia and Albania that followed the appearance of a drone with a flag depicting the so called Greater Albania, massive hacker attacks organized by Albanians were carried out against Serbian news websites, Zoran Zivkovic, president of the Association of Information Security Serbia, has said.

Last Tuesday after 21:00 p.m., a well-organized hacker community attacked all important news websites in our country, and only one remained intact, Zivkovic said for Belgrade daily Vecernje novosti.

He said that the so-called DDoS attack on Serbian websites was carried out from about 1.5 million computers from around the world, adding that Albanians could not do that by themselves, but that they could pay for it.

Commenting on the price that the Albanian side had to pay, Zivkovic said that the average value of a DDoS attack stands at USD 100,000 per hour.

He believes that the attack was carried out by a hacker organization with millions of computers under the control of its "bot program", adding that the precision of attack and the selection of targets suggest that it was all carefully planned.

Zivkovic said that the attack lasted several hours and was stronger than 35 Gbps, which has never happened to date in our region.

The peak of the attack, according to Zivkovic's analysis, took place at 21.30 p.m., when the attacker bombed servers of Serbian media houses with 40 Gbps and only one well-protected website sustained the attack, while others at least occasionally reported that they are blocked or unresponsive.

Photo Tanjug/D. Stankovic (illustration, archive)