Royal Family website crashes after it is ‘targeted by Russian hackers in cyber attack’

A Russian hacker claims to have taken down the royal family’s official website with a targeted hack.

Hacker KillMilk, the alleged leader of the Russian hacktivist group KillNet, claimed in a Telegram post that they attacked the royal family’s official website on Sunday.

The group claimed the takedown was an “attack on pedophiles.”

It was reported that the Royal Family’s website, royal.uk, had been offline for around 90 minutes and simply displayed an error message at around 10.20am this morning, but is now live again.

This is not the first time that KillNet has gone after the royal family, as in November 2022 the website was taken offline for hours by a DDoS attack.

KillNet is a pro-Russian group known for its attacks on government institutions and private companies around the world.

It is understood that the group formed around March 2022 and supported Russia and its invasion of Ukraine.

The Five Eyes intelligence network, made up of agencies from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK, warned in April 2022 that KillNet was one of several hacker groups that had pledged to support Russia and threatened to attack anyone who attacked Russia . or supported Ukraine.

KillNet is known for its Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks.

These types of cyber attacks aim to make servers and computers unavailable to their intended users by disrupting the services of a host connected to a network.

Hackers conduct DoS and DDoS attacks by flooding servers with requests, overwhelming them and rendering them unusable for a while.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, but a royal source told MailOnline that the website was the victim of a DoS attack and that its servers had not been compromised.

The source added that the website was back up and running within two hours, but said palace staff have not yet been able to identify the perpetrator.