Roscosmos hacked after posting satellite images of NATO members' facilities: Report

Russian space agency Roscosmos has claimed that its website recently underwent a DDoS attack after posting satellite images of facilities of NATO member countries. Dmitry Strugovets, spokesperson of Roscosmos said as per Russian news agency TASS that the images featured the "decision-making centers" of NATO members, however, he revealed that the attack was carried out from one of the Russian cities. A DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack is when a server is hacked which results in the denial of information to the users. 

"After Roscosmos had posted satellite images of [NATO’s] ‘decision-making centers,’ the state corporation's website came under a DDoS attack", the spokesperson said on Telegram. "Unlike in March and April, this time, the attack did not come from overseas but from our own city of Yekaterinburg". 

The cyber attack comes just a day after Roscosmos posted satellite images of the ongoing NATO summit in Spain's Madrid as well as facilities of countries supporting Ukraine. According to TASS, these images taken by a Resurs-P remote-sensing satellite featured the US White House, the Pentagon, the British Defense Ministry and similar facilities in France and Germany's capital city Brussels, which also happens to be NATO's headquarters. 

Russia-Ukraine conflict and cyber-warfare

Three months ago, in early March, Roscosmos Director-General Dmitry Rogozin had rejected claims of his agency's website getting hacked by a hacking group named 'Anonymous'. Notably, cyber-warfare has played a huge role in the war especially considering Russian forces destroying Ukraine's communication services. In the same month, Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedovor requested SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to deploy his Starlink satellite internet services for uninterrupted communication. 

However, Musk soon warned that the satellite might encounter cyber attacks by Russian hackers, something which he later confirmed by revealing that Starlink has so far defended all such hacking attempts. It was due to these reasons that Russia declared war on Starlink as well alleging that its internet was being used to operate drones that were causing trouble for the Russian military. Earlier in late February, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had said that is gathering details regarding the cyberattack on Ukrainian state and bank websites. Last month, the US even warned Russia not to escalate the tension through cyber-conflict.