The Royal Family's official website went down for about an hour and a half in the early hours of Sunday morning after being targeted by a cyber attack, The Telegraph reported. As per the report, no access to the website, its systems, or its content was gained. Upon visiting the URL, royal. uk, the page displayed an error message, ''Gateway time-out Error code 504.''
''We've just received breaking news that the Royal Family website has crashed after allegedly being targeted by Russian hackers who have reportedly taken responsibility for the attack on social media. “If you try to access the website, you get an error message,'' Sky News host Caroline Di Russo said.
Russian hacker group Killnet has claimed responsibility for the cyber attack. In a message shared on Telegram, a messaging app, the hacker added a link to the website which provided information about the monarch, the Firm, and the Royal Family's role in the UK and the Commonwealth. They added the supposed takedown was an "attack on pedophiles".
Though these attacks don't cause major damage, they can lead to outages lasting several hours or even days. However, it has not been confirmed they were behind it.
The Royal family's website was up and running again by midday.
As per Express.co.uk, KillMilk is the leader of the Russian hacktivist DDoS collective Killnet. KillNet is known for its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaigns and has launched similar attacks against countries supporting Ukraine, especially NATO countries, since the start of the war in February last year. A DDOS attack involves knocking a website offline by flooding it with traffic.
Killnet has in the past claimed attacks on US government websites and said it has taken action against other countries opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
In November last year, the European Parliament website was also hit by a cyber attack claimed by Killnet shortly after lawmakers approved a resolution calling Moscow a "state sponsor of terrorism".
