Hacktivist DDoS Attacks: A Defender's Guide

Pro-Russian hacktivist groups now average 50 DDoS attacks per day against Western targets (Recorded Future, 2025). These are not random acts. They are coordinated campaigns timed to elections, holidays, and geopolitical flashpoints, designed to erode public trust in institutions.

The most active group, NoName057(16), has targeted more than 3,700 unique hosts in the past thirteen months alone. Their attacks are not sophisticated. But they are relentless, strategically timed, and increasingly effective at generating headlines.

This pattern repeats across Europe. The question for defenders is not whether hacktivist groups will target your sector. It is whether you are prepared when they do.

Get threat intelligence like this delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to CyberDesserts for practical security insights, no fluff.

Pro-Russian Hacktivist Groups: NoName057(16) and the DDoS Ecosystem

Understanding the threat starts with understanding the actors. These are not lone hackers or criminal gangs seeking ransom. They are ideologically motivated groups with nationalist agendas and surprisingly professional operations.

NoName057(16) emerged in March 2022, days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The group operates through a crowdsourced platform called DDoSia. Volunteers download a simple Go-based tool, receive cryptocurrency rewards for participation, and launch attacks against centrally coordinated target lists.

In July 2025, Europol executed Operation Eastwood, issuing arrest warrants for six suspected operators and dismantling several hundred command-and-control servers across twelve countries. Despite this, the group resumed operations within days. The decentralised volunteer model makes it resilient to law enforcement action.

Other active groups include:

• Killnet: Collapsed in late 2023 after its founder was publicly identified, but has resurfaced under new leadership focused on hack-for-hire services
• IT Army of Russia: Appeared in March 2025, actively recruiting insiders working in Ukrainian critical infrastructure
• TwoNet: Emerged January 2025 with approximately 40 members targeting Ukraine, Spain, and the UK
• Cyber Army of Russia Reborn: Subject to US sanctions, now largely dormant but still tracked by CISA

These groups frequently collaborate, share target lists, and coordinate timing. The threat landscape is not a single actor but a loosely connected ecosystem. And they have developed a consistent playbook for choosing when and where to strike.

How Hacktivist Targeting Works

Target selection is deliberate. These groups time attacks to moments when disruption generates maximum visibility and public frustration.

Recent examples demonstrate the pattern:

• France (December 2025): La Poste during peak Christmas shipping
• Denmark (November 2025): Municipal websites during local elections
• Romania (2024): Government sites during presidential campaign
• Belgium (October 2024): Government and port websites during elections
• Czech Republic (January 2023): Presidential candidate websites during voting

The goal is not data theft or ransom. It is trust erosion. When citizens cannot track packages, access government services, or use online banking during critical moments, confidence in institutions degrades. That is the strategic objective.

Globally, DDoS attacks have exploded. Cloudflare blocked 20.5 million attacks in Q1 2025 alone, a 358% year-over-year increase. Hacktivist groups now drive 63% of all cyber incidents targeting the public sector (ENISA, 2025).

But what actually happens when one of these attacks succeeds? The La Poste incident offers a detailed case study in what breaks, what survives, and why.

Case Study: Why La Poste's Payments Survived but Web Services Failed

Technical analysis suggests the attack targeted the interconnection between one of La Poste's datacenters and the internet. This single network boundary served multiple consumer services: online banking, the main website, the mobile app, Colissimo parcel tracking, and the Digiposte digital safe. By overwhelming this one chokepoint, attackers took down everything routed through it.

What failed: Consumer-facing services shared a common interconnection point without sufficient redundancy. When that link became saturated, everything behind it went dark simultaneously.

What worked: Payment systems remained operational throughout the attack. Card transactions, bank transfers, and interbank clearing continued because they used a separate technical flow that did not route through the targeted datacenter. ATMs kept dispensing cash. In-store card payments processed normally.

The lesson is clear: La Poste's payment infrastructure was properly segmented from consumer web services. That segmentation saved them from a far worse outcome. But their customer-facing applications lacked the same architectural separation.

There was also a warning that went unheeded. Two days before the main attack, on December 20, La Poste experienced hours of disruption from what appears to have been a probing attack. The attackers were testing defences before timing the full assault to Christmas week.

Organisations reviewing their own resilience should ask: if attackers saturated our primary internet interconnection, which services would survive? The answer reveals where segmentation is working and where single points of failure remain.

But there is another risk that the La Poste incident illustrates, one that most defenders overlook entirely.

When DDoS Is a Smokescreen: The Distraction Attack Pattern

A loud DDoS attack makes an effective smokescreen. While security teams scramble to restore availability, attackers may be quietly moving elsewhere.

CISA has warned that hacktivist groups increasingly combine DDoS with direct manipulation of operational technology systems. Groups like Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and Z-Pentest have targeted internet-facing SCADA and HMI systems, exploiting default credentials while organisations focus on the visible disruption.

The La Poste attack came days after threat actors breached France's Interior Ministry, stealing police records and documents. Whether connected or coincidental, the pattern reinforces a critical point: do not let a DDoS consume all your attention.

The good news is that these attacks, while persistent, are not technically sophisticated. Defence is achievable with the right preparation.

How to Defend Against Hacktivist DDoS

These attacks succeed through volume and timing, not technical brilliance. That means defence comes down to preparation, architecture, and response planning.

1. Deploy Layered Protection

Think of DDoS protection like flood defences. A sandbag wall around your building might stop minor flooding, but it cannot handle a tsunami. That is the problem with on-premises DDoS appliances: they sit at your front door and can only absorb as much traffic as your internet connection allows. Modern attacks routinely exceed 1 terabit per second. No single office or data centre connection can handle that volume.

Cloud-based protection works differently. Instead of trying to absorb the flood at your doorstep, it intercepts traffic thousands of miles away, across a globally distributed network. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare, Akamai, or Fastly operate data centres worldwide. When attack traffic arrives, it gets absorbed and filtered across this massive infrastructure before it ever reaches your actual servers.

Scrubbing services work similarly but specialise purely in attack mitigation. Traffic routes through their cleaning centres, malicious packets get dropped, and only legitimate requests continue to your systems.

The key point: cloud providers can scale to absorb attacks that would instantly overwhelm any single organisation. CISA explicitly recommends CDN solutions over on-premises options because of this scalability advantage.

2. Hide Your Origin Servers

Cloud protection only works if attackers do not know where your actual servers live. If they discover your origin IP address, they can bypass your CDN entirely and attack your infrastructure directly. All that cloud protection becomes useless.

Here is how origin IPs get exposed:

• DNS history: Multiple services archive historical DNS records, including SecurityTrails, ViewDNS, Censys, and Shodan. Attackers routinely query these databases as a first reconnaissance step. If your domain ever pointed directly to your server before you added CDN protection, that old IP address is still findable. There are even open-source tools specifically designed to automate this lookup and test whether discovered IPs still respond.
• Email headers: Outbound emails from your domain often include server IP addresses in the headers. Attackers check these routinely.
• Error messages: Misconfigured applications sometimes leak internal IP addresses in error pages or API responses.
• Third-party integrations: Webhook callbacks, API connections, or external services might connect directly to your origin, exposing the address.
• Subdomains: Your main site routes through the CDN, but a forgotten subdomain like mail.example.com or dev.example.com points directly to the origin.

To stay protected, audit everything that could reveal your origin. Use your CDN for all public-facing services. Configure your firewall to only accept connections from your CDN provider's IP ranges, rejecting everything else. If attackers cannot reach your origin directly, your cloud protection remains effective.

3. Establish Traffic Baselines

Know what normal traffic looks like. Continuous monitoring allows faster detection of anomalies. This is where continuous threat exposure management becomes valuable: organisations running CTEM programmes detect attacks earlier because they understand their baseline.

4. Configure Rate Limiting Carefully

Rate limiting helps, but overly aggressive thresholds block legitimate users. Analyse traffic patterns before setting limits. Consider tiered approaches: standard thresholds for normal traffic, managed challenges for suspicious bursts.

5. Protect Application-Layer Endpoints

Volumetric attacks get attention, but Layer 7 (application-layer) attacks are often more damaging. Web application firewalls configured to detect and block malicious request patterns are essential. Pay particular attention to API endpoints, which are increasingly targeted.

6. Test Your Response Plan

A response plan that has not been tested is not a plan. Conduct regular exercises simulating DDoS scenarios. Define roles, escalation paths, and communication procedures before you need them.

7. Maintain Visibility During Attacks

This connects back to the distraction risk. During a DDoS event, keep watching your entire environment. Monitor for lateral movement, credential abuse, and unusual access patterns. The DDoS may be the distraction, not the objective.

Knowing what to do is only half the equation. Equally important is knowing what not to waste time on.

DDoS Defence Mistakes: What Will Not Protect You

Some common approaches are ineffective against modern hacktivist attacks:

Broad IP blocking: NoName057(16) uses volunteer nodes on legitimate cloud providers and CDNs. Blocking entire IP ranges causes significant overblocking of legitimate traffic.

Reactive-only posture: Waiting until an attack starts to activate protection is too slow. DDoS mitigation must be always-on.

Relying on ISP protection alone: Not all upstream providers can handle hyper-volumetric attacks. Validate capabilities before you need them.

Ignoring probing attacks: La Poste experienced disruption two days before the main assault. Treat early anomalies as reconnaissance, not random noise.

Summary

Hacktivist DDoS is now sustained, coordinated, and strategically timed. Groups like NoName057(16) operate with near-professional discipline, striking during elections, holidays, and geopolitical flashpoints to maximise disruption. The La Poste attack was not an outlier. It was the latest in a pattern that will continue.

The attacks themselves are not sophisticated. Defence is achievable. But it requires layered cloud-based protection, hidden origin infrastructure, continuous monitoring, and response plans that have actually been tested. La Poste's experience shows both what proper segmentation can protect and what happens when critical services share a single point of failure.

For defenders, the key insight is this: hacktivist DDoS is not about taking systems offline. It is about eroding trust in the institutions those systems support. Understanding that motivation helps prioritise which assets need the strongest protection.

Hacktivist tactics evolve and new attacks happen regularly. Subscribers receive notifications when this guidance is updated, plus weekly practical security content. No sales pitches, no fluff.

Last updated: December 2025

References and Sources

1. La Poste Groupe. (2025). Cyberattack on 22 December: What You Need to Know. Official statement confirming DDoS attack and service restoration timeline.
2. Cloudflare. (2025). DDoS Threat Report Q1 2025. 20.5 million attacks blocked, 358% YoY increase.
3. ENISA. (2025). Public Sector Threat Landscape. 60% of public sector incidents were DDoS; 63% attributed to hacktivist groups.
4. Recorded Future. (2025). Inside DDoSia: NoName057(16)'s Pro-Russian DDoS Campaign Infrastructure. 3,700+ unique hosts targeted over 13 months.
5. Europol. (2025). Operation Eastwood. Coordinated action against NoName057(16) across 12 countries, July 2025.
6. CISA, FBI, MS-ISAC. (2024). Understanding and Responding to Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks. Joint guidance for critical infrastructure.
7. CISA. (2025). Pro-Russia Hacktivist Activity Targeting OT Systems. Joint advisory on hacktivist intrusion tactics.
8. Databack. (2025). DDoS Cyberattack Against La Poste and La Banque Postale. Technical analysis of December 22 incident, including affected services and architectural factors.