Dutch party websites attacked as EU elections begin – POLITICO

The centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) and the populist far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) all had problems with their websites.

CDA announced on X that its website had been subjected to a “severe” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “On election day, we consider this an attack on free, democratic elections,” it said.

A DDoS attack is a cyberattack in which hackers send large amounts of Internet traffic to an organization’s website in an attempt to overload it and take it offline. The attacks are sometimes used in combination with more sophisticated, damaging cyberattacks aimed at infiltrating IT systems.

FvD leader Thierry Baudet said on X that his team was “working overtime” to fend off a “Matrix attack.”

The Netherlands is the first country to open polling stations for the European elections from 6 to 9 June.