Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Institute, have disclosed a cyberattack on their infrastructure, aimed at disrupting the live stream of the award ceremony held last month.
This is specifically a DDoS attack, as noted by the Nobel community, and the ones behind this incident are not known as of now. But, there’s speculation that state-backed hackers can possibly be the perpetrators, considering the allegations against the Nobel team for biased decisions since the past.
Cyberattack Against Nobel Foundation
The Norwegian Nobel Institute and the Nobel Foundation have disclosed a cyberattack on their infrastructure last month, right when they’re hosting a virtual award ceremony on December 10th, 2022. This was being live-streamed from Oslo and Stockholm, and was reportedly interrupted by a DDoS attack!
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), as noted by the Nobel Foundation in its notice, said is aimed at disrupting legitimate activities. The concept here is to send a dump of garbage traffic towards the legitimate service and have its limited resources overflow and crash.
This will eventually block access to legitimate users, thus denying the service for all. Explaining this incident, the Nobel Foundation said
“The Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Institute, therefore, regard this as a serious attack on the Nobel Prize and have reported it to the police in order to help generate awareness of this type of cyberattack.”
There’s no information on who could possibly be behind this, but a state-backed hacker is likely considering the biased allegations on Nobel Foundation since past. The awarding panel, a number of times, is being accused of making biased decisions on selecting the award recipients.
Aside from this, the Nobel Foundation was also accused of not recognizing the crucial works of researchers and discovery pioneers, who made key contributions for awarded studies.
