DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status

8/3/2026 at 8:34:12 PM

The actual interesting part about such an attack is not that something is down, but rather why someone would run it. A lot of DDoS originates from script kiddies, but such attacks are usually very short lived as attacks are expensive. So which actor would actually benefit from downing the Norwegian government?

by just_some_user

8/3/2026 at 8:43:23 PM

DDoS tends to be monetised as DDoS-as-a-service. Taking down "significant" services is good advertising. Either that, or they plan to extort the Norwegian government.

by Retr0id

8/3/2026 at 8:48:37 PM

But for such a "proof of power" a short attack which takes the service down once is enough, long attacks are not so common and actually require some work from the attacker

by just_some_user

8/3/2026 at 8:56:27 PM

If the attack doesn't last long, bystanders can't know whether it was trivially mitigated by the victim.

A shorter attack won't make as many news headlines, either.

by Retr0id

8/3/2026 at 8:57:14 PM

Unless part of the social proof is that mitigation is more difficult.

by devin

8/3/2026 at 8:39:55 PM

is there actually any source those attacks are really done by "script kiddies"?

More likely this more politically motivated and backed up by money and more capable groups

by roflmaostc

8/3/2026 at 8:49:21 PM

Yes, thats what I meant

by just_some_user

8/3/2026 at 8:44:22 PM

Probably a country that lost to Norway in the World Cup.

by giwook

8/3/2026 at 8:38:18 PM

What do they benefit from taking down any government, NGO or civic work program? American systems, as well as larger European systems are constantly attacked. I've seen the same traffic. Fire walling off China, North Korea and smaller eastern European countries is a must if you ever plan to expose any internet exposed services.

by InTheArena

8/3/2026 at 8:43:01 PM

Imo russia most likely

by cantalopes

8/3/2026 at 8:39:14 PM

Really, you have no one in mind? Someone who is sending hundreds of bombing drones daily to Ukraine, killing civilian population, women and children, and who is eager to send a message to NATO countries any way possible?

by cynicalsecurity

8/3/2026 at 8:44:39 PM

That is much less effective than every other manner they tested on the past few years such as shadow fleets, ghost satellites etc.

Up to the moment it has not been the operation adopted which would make it weird.

On who would do it then, anyone who benefits from instability. From corporations trying to sell flocked uped sytems, politicians, etc.

There is one south american country who was attacked exactly this way before their head of the government was kidnapped.

by motbus3

8/3/2026 at 9:21:23 PM

You don't understand Kremlin's mentality. Any even little nasty thing they can do to the West makes them giggle like Doctor Evil. "Oh, a NATO country's government infra was not protected from DDoS? Let's have fun, haha!" You are dealing with story book villains. I know, this sounds so ridiculous it's hard to believe someone can actually be like this. But then the reality check hits.

by cynicalsecurity

8/3/2026 at 11:19:25 PM

They aren't story book villains. I think this says a lot about your mentality.

by throwaway742

8/3/2026 at 11:06:07 PM

I didn't know Israel was supplying drones to Ukraine

by inigyou

8/3/2026 at 9:37:21 PM

It hasn't been majorly like that in twenty years.

Botnets are services now, a business. They gain customers by their effectiveness and resilience.

For $$50-100 you can deny service to a lot of big sites and services.

by esseph

8/3/2026 at 11:06:54 PM

I've seen people say this but no proof of it. Could I really take down Stack Overflow for $50? Oh wait, it took itself down for free.

by inigyou

8/3/2026 at 8:37:38 PM

those script kiddies control botnets in foreign countries and use them to attack stuff just bc. its not their compute, so no marginal cost to them

by iwontberude

8/3/2026 at 8:43:16 PM

The UK. It wants to steal Norway's vast stores of electricity.

by tuatoru

8/3/2026 at 9:08:02 PM

"vast stores of electricity"?

by Crunchified

8/3/2026 at 9:21:25 PM

Electricity production in Norway is predominantly hydroelectric.

When it rains dams fill up. The water is drained into shafts with turbines, and electricity is generated.

However, even though we are big on hydroelectricity percentage wise I’m not sure it’s all that vast an amount of electricity on a global scale. We are a pretty small country after all.

According to Wikipedia, the Norwegian electricity sector had 40.26 GW installed capacity as of 2021 and was producing 157.113 TWh in the same year. [1]

Great Britain had 74.8 GW installed capacity in 2023 and was producing 292.7 TWh in 2023. [2]

France was producing 537.7 TWh in 2020. [3]

Germany was producing 488.5 TWh in 2024. [4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_in_Great_Britain

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

by QuantumNomad_

8/3/2026 at 9:33:34 PM

It stored energy. It's not stored electricity.

by Crunchified

8/3/2026 at 9:06:36 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

8/3/2026 at 10:30:11 PM

I'd guess someone in the us fat-fingered ip ranges and mixed up 2.144.0.0/14 (Iran) with 2.148.0.0/14 (Norway)

by lschueller

8/3/2026 at 10:48:23 PM

Or someone entered 2.144.0.0/14 but on a machine without ECC and a bit-flip happened, turning it into 2.148.0.0/14.

by TacticalCoder

8/3/2026 at 10:01:46 PM

There's some interesting commentry at https://www.techtimes.com/articles/322754/20260803/norway-id... , which suggests that the widespread outage is due to a single point of failure:

> ID-Porten: When One Gateway Controls Everything

> At the center of the disruption is ID-porten — the national login gateway operated by Norway's Digitaliseringsdirektoratet (Digdir), the government agency responsible for public-sector digitalization. ID-porten functions as the single sign-on portal through which Norwegian citizens authenticate themselves to access public digital services.

It seems to be a corporate service provider that's a dependency for many other services.

by speerer

8/3/2026 at 8:24:28 PM

There has been also DDoS against my friend's employer ISP. He had to work a lot to mitigate. There was a random request before

by p0w3n3d

8/3/2026 at 8:45:43 PM

The bus card ride purchase system was down today in my part of Finland. I wonder if it is related.

by leke

8/3/2026 at 9:07:49 PM

Would the attack be successful is the Norwegian government used a way to protect itself against ddos like cloudflare or akamai?

by spapas82

8/3/2026 at 11:07:39 PM

I certainly hope the Norwegian government doesn't force all of its citizens to transmit all of their private data to the US government.

by inigyou

8/3/2026 at 8:41:18 PM

Bets on which AI lab it is this time?

by kachnuv_ocasek

8/3/2026 at 8:56:29 PM

Many important services with problems. Ouch. My guess is that the root cause is misconfiguration rather than an attack.

by AtNightWeCode

8/3/2026 at 11:44:57 PM

From TFA:

> Det har siden kl. 01 mandag 3. august pågått et tjenestenektangrep (DDoS) som rammer ID-porten som driftes hos Digdirs driftspartner Vivicta.

> Since 0100 hours Monday August 31st there's been an ongoing DDoS attack which affects the ID-Portal which is run/hosted by DepDig's (Department of digital services') service provider Vivicta.

(My translation)

by e12e

8/3/2026 at 10:02:00 PM

<hat type="tinfoil">I wonder who wants the Norwegian gov infrastructure between a TLS terminating proxy service</hat>

by crest

8/3/2026 at 8:43:50 PM

The Internet was supposed to withstand a nuclear attack

by roschdal

8/3/2026 at 8:55:22 PM

"The internet" is currently fine, besides Norwegian government services.

Also something designed to withstand something does not imply it survives other somethings.

by buildbot

8/3/2026 at 8:48:05 PM

Guess a nuclear attack would actually lessen the load on the global internet, rather than increase it - like a DDOS would!

by pprotas

8/3/2026 at 9:04:32 PM

[dead]

by vee-kay

8/3/2026 at 8:27:38 PM

[flagged]

by nubg

8/3/2026 at 8:48:20 PM

Could be, but it does not look like any of the ways they done before. Anyone who benefits from instability would be at win, from internal political competition, foreign companies trying to sell flocked up systems and the list could be huge.

Not saying it was not who you think it was, Im just saying it does not have enough information yet to be the only explanation or at least the most obvious one.

by motbus3

8/3/2026 at 8:29:13 PM

could just be openai.

by cyanydeez

8/3/2026 at 8:49:33 PM

[flagged]

by coffinbirth

8/3/2026 at 9:08:53 PM

Whispers

Hey, hey

Did you know

Multiple things can in fact, be bad

by CursedSilicon

8/3/2026 at 9:13:00 PM

[flagged]

by coffinbirth

8/3/2026 at 9:32:49 PM

This is a non-sequitur.

by rcxdude

8/3/2026 at 9:53:07 PM

Australian but go off :)

by CursedSilicon

8/3/2026 at 9:39:49 PM

As someone from Poland I want to confirm that multiple things can be in fact bad.

Being invaded by Nazi Germany and days later by their ally, Russia was example of such case.

by matkoniecz

8/3/2026 at 9:47:54 PM

[flagged]

by justsomehnguy

8/3/2026 at 9:51:50 PM

At no point I claimed that Poland was land of saints and cuddly plush bears. See also Bereza Kartuska.

What you linked does not change at all that being invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany and Soviet Union was absolutely awful and both were clearly evil.

(and if you want to start oppression olympics, then yes: what Germany and Russia did was far worse than what Poland did, for that matter what Ukrainian OUN UPA did was far worse than what Poland did)

by matkoniecz

8/3/2026 at 9:58:19 PM

It hurts what you actually was on the same level but got the short end, eh?

by justsomehnguy

8/3/2026 at 8:59:42 PM

Maybe you should stop invading other countries if these comparisons hurt your feelings buddy.

by indemnity

8/3/2026 at 9:09:24 PM

I always find it unbelievable how people do not know or just forget about what happened in the east 85 years ago. Really sad. This is one of the primary reasons why people in the west don't understand why Russia cannot accept Ukraine in NATO. It was NATO that expanded to the east, contrary to the agreements after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

by coffinbirth

8/3/2026 at 9:22:48 PM

Ukraine sought NATO membership AFTER Russia attacked in 2014, not before.

Since you’re such a history buff, what did Russia promise when Ukraine got rid of their nukes?

by anon48293

8/3/2026 at 9:52:03 PM

> Ukraine got rid of their nukes

Russia is the official successor state of the Soviet Union, the nukes never belonged to Ukraine in the first place. It was Ukraine that first attacked LPR and DPR in 2014. It was Ukraine that forbid Russian language, culture, church, etc... to Russians living in eastern Ukraine. By the way, Odessa will return to Russia.

by coffinbirth

8/3/2026 at 10:30:28 PM

Answer the question. What did Russia state in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances?

by anon48293

8/3/2026 at 10:04:38 PM

> NATO Action Plan membership (Georgia and Ukraine) 4 April 2008

Sure, sure a fresh "anon" account.

by justsomehnguy

8/3/2026 at 9:32:59 PM

Let me tell you what's actually "really sad": Bucha as a response to sovereign country's attempt to join NATO. Having a hostile country as a neighbour isn't an excuse for starting a war with it.

by SukadarBukadar

8/3/2026 at 9:54:52 PM

Following this logic Mexico and Canada can both join a military alliance with China and Russia, I guess the U.S. must accept that, both are sovereign country's after all...

by coffinbirth

8/3/2026 at 9:56:25 PM

And if in response USA would invade and start massacring civilians (like Russia did), that would be in fact evil.

by matkoniecz

8/3/2026 at 9:25:32 PM

> what happened in the east 85 years ago

Russia got attacked by their ally, Nazi Germany. After 87 years ago in 1939 they invaded together Poland.

> Really sad.

Yeah, Russia going on to win WW II was quite sad. Admittedly better than Nazis winning but pity they have not both lost.

> contrary to the agreements after the fall of the Soviet Union

which supposed agreements? Were they any more binding than Budapest Memorandum?

> Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

And Russia in Ukraine is unacceptable for us.

by matkoniecz

8/3/2026 at 9:51:59 PM

> Russia said for decades that Ukraine in NATO is unacceptable.

Russia, as a hostile nation not interested in participating in global peace, doesn’t get to decide such things.

by antonvs