Don’t underestimate pro-Russia hacktivists, warns UK’s cyber crew
Summary
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued an alert warning that pro-Russia hacktivist groups are targeting UK organisations — notably local authorities and critical national infrastructure (CNI) — with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. While these groups are often not technically sophisticated, their opportunistic campaigns can still cause significant disruption, financial loss and recovery overheads.
The alert reiterates earlier international warnings (including a recent CISA advisory) that named groups such as NoName057(16) have been persistent in targeting councils and other public sector sites. The NCSC urges organisations to follow freely available guidance, consider third-party DDoS mitigation and CDNs, and strengthen basic hygiene like patching and securing remote access services.
Key Points
- NCSC warns pro-Russia hacktivists are a real threat to local authorities and CNI, mainly via DoS attacks.
- Denial-of-service attacks are often simple technically but can still produce serious service outages and costs.
- NoName057(16) is singled out for persistent targeting of council websites; other groups (CARR, Z-Pentest, Sector16) were noted in a prior international advisory.
- Attackers typically rely on opportunism — unpatched software, insecure VNC and similar exposure — rather than advanced techniques.
- NCSC recommends reviewing its guidance, using third-party DDoS mitigation, employing CDNs for web services, and ensuring basic patching and configuration hygiene.
- CISA suggests using multiple service providers for resilience and other checklist measures to maintain uptime during attacks.
Context and Relevance
This advisory sits within a broader trend of state-aligned hacktivism and hybrid operations where noisy, low-complexity attacks are used to disrupt services and signal intent. Governments and public-sector organisations are frequent targets because outages have immediate public impact and recovery is often costly.
The warning reinforces the importance of basic cyber resilience measures — not just for high-profile CNI operators but for any organisation providing essential online services. It also highlights the recurring pattern where hacktivists overstate impact, so clear incident assessment and communication are important to avoid needless alarm.
Why should I read this?
Look — these groups might not be geniuses, but they can still knock your services offline and cost you time and money. If you run a council website, a utility, or any public-facing service, this is the kind of heads-up you need: patch, lock down VNC/remote access, and think about DDoS protection or a CDN before you get woken up at 03:00 fixing it.
Author style
Punchy — the piece is a clear warning from the NCSC. If you’re responsible for availability or resilience, treat the details as operationally important rather than background noise.