On the night before Thursday, VG was again subjected to a denial of service attack, in which the attacker ensured extremely high traffic to the website, which in turn created technical problems.

At 2:39 pm Wednesday, the first attack came and within hours we had complete control. A little after one o’clock last night, a similar service attack occurred again. We quickly gained control, and VG.no was unstable for only three minutes, says development editor at VG yvind Brene.

Denial of service attacks are often attacks where someone delivers very high traffic to a site.

Traffic comes from various places around the world, and makes regular VG users experience instability. The goal is often to take down websites.

Brene emphasized that VG was not hacked.

– This is a denial of service attack where the goal is to take down the website. There was no indication that anyone had entered our systems and that was not the purpose of the denial of service attack, Brene said.

If VG was hacked, those who attacked could, for example, have the goal of obtaining personal data or changing content on websites, but this is not the case, Brene explained.

VG has set up a good routine to deal with such attacks, and has all the tools needed to gain control.

Strong attack on NRK

NRK also experienced a service attack on their website on Wednesday.

– We were subjected to a denial of service attack at around 6:40 pm last night. It lasted five minutes and we had about five minutes of downtime on NRK.no, said head of technology at NRK, Thomas Walter van Deurs.

That the Norwegian media was attacked, he said, was as expected. Those who carry out such attacks are often looking for important websites or websites with a lot of traffic.

– They are often looking to create visibility for themselves and their group, or create fear and show that they can do harm. Or they want to temporarily disable the website, says Walter van Deurs.

– It’s a powerful attack, but we don’t think the damage is too big. It was more like vandalism than real damage, he said.

Normal operation after attack

National security authorities described the attack as a low-level crisis, and said most large companies were prepared for such an incident.

Businesses such as BankID, Arbeidstilsynet, Skatteetaten and NAV were also hit on Wednesday.

– Our assessment, based on dialogue with the affected companies in addition to our own monitoring, is that this has now been addressed, and that the affected services are operating normally, said acting head of the National Cybersecurity Center at NSM Lene Kaland on Thursday afternoon.

– This is due both to the fact that the company in question implemented effective measures until yesterday, in addition to the fact that traffic from attackers has decreased, he said.

Russian actor announces attack

A service attack against several large Norwegian companies was announced on Wednesday by Russian group Killnet.

They have published an image of, see above, Secretary of State Anniken Huitfeldt in what appears to be a Maleficent mask, from the Disney film of the same name.

– Good morning Norway! Everyone is ready to attack!

“Madam. Error », they refer to the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs as.

Killnet is a notorious pro-Russian player who was behind a number of computer attacks to support the invasion of Ukraine.

It is uncertain whether Killnet was behind the attack in Norway on Wednesday night.