Hackers attack EU executive

BRUSSELS:

Hackers attacked the European Commission’s computers on Thursday, flooding the EU executive’s servers with digital service requests, but while connection speeds were affected, there was no data breach, the Commission said. “Yesterday afternoon the Commission was targeted by an attempt to saturate our internet connection,” Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas told a news briefing yesterday. “The commission took effective countermeasures and there was no interruption of service, although connection speeds were affected for a while, there was no data breach,” he said. Schinas said the Commission did not know who was behind the attack, which was of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) type when too many simultaneous requests to servers cause the service to crash. The attack happened as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko visited Brussels to discuss visa free travel to the EU. Schinas declined to comment if there was any connection between the attack and the visit.

LinkedIn hacker

In another development, the Czech Justice Ministry says Russia has joined the United States in seeking the extradition of a Russian man who faces charges in the United States of hacking and stealing information from computers at LinkedIn, Dropbox and other San Francisco Bay Area companies. The Justice Ministry said Wednesday that Russia wants Yevgeniy Nikulin of Moscow extradited due to a 2009 Internet theft. — Agencies