A French-language newspaper in Belgium was the victim of a cyberattack on Sunday night, pushing its websites offline for several hours.
Analysts called the attack notable given the recent cyber vioence against France’s TV5Monde, a global television network that was knocked off the air for 18 hours last week.
{mosads}That attack was the work of hackers who called themselves the CyberCaliphate and pledged their loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The group defaced TV5Monde’s website and social media accounts with ISIS-related imagery, and described their efforts as retaliation for French military activity against ISIS.
No such vandalism took place during the attack on Belgium’s Le Soir, but that does not rule out the possibility of a copycat hack, experts said.
The attack also follows an online campaign last week to take down the website of a division of the Belgian government. Hackers behind that effort identified themselves as Tunisian Islamists.
The director of Le Soir, Didier Hamann, said the paper has still not identified who was behind the attack. The intruders also hit other Belgian media properties, including Sudpresse.