The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned that pro-Russia hacktivists are continuing to target UK organisations.

Local government and critical infrastructure operators are being warned to harden the ‘denial of service’ (DoS) defences.

Russian-aligned hacktivist groups are attempting to disrupt operations, take websites offline and disable services.

The NCSC highlighted NoName057(16), which has been active since March 2022 and has been been conducting attacks against government and private sector entities in NATO member states and other European countries that are perceived as hostile to Russian geopolitical interests. Attacks included frequent DDoS attempts against UK local government.

Organisations are being advised to review their defences, and to improve resilience against attacks from Russian-aligned group. In particular, they are being asked to review DoS protections. This includes understanding the service, upstreaming defences, building to allow scaling and defining a response plan, as well as testing and monitoring the service.