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UK Cyber Agency Warns of Ongoing Pro‑Russian Hacktivist DDoS Threat to Public Services

The NCSC urges immediate adoption of DDoS resilience measures to blunt persistent pro‑Russian campaigns.

Overview

  • Britain’s NCSC issued a fresh alert on January 19 warning that local authorities and operators of critical national infrastructure remain priority targets for disruptive attacks.
  • The campaigns rely mainly on denial‑of‑service tactics that are simple to execute yet capable of knocking services offline and imposing significant recovery costs.
  • The alert singles out NoName057(16), active since March 2022 and known for crowdsourced DDoS via its DDoSia platform, which rebounded after a 2025 law‑enforcement disruption.
  • Recommended defenses include third‑party DDoS mitigation, use of CDNs, strengthened upstream protections, redundancy across multiple providers, scalable architectures, rehearsed response plans, and continuous monitoring.
  • The agency says operations are ideologically motivated and often overstate their impact, yet opportunistic techniques exploiting unpatched systems or insecure VNC can still cause real disruption; a December joint advisory also named CARR, Z‑Pentest, and Sector16.