'Pro-Russia' hackers take control of EU Parliament website

The European Parliament's website was down for few hours on Wednesday due to a denial-of-service attack by "Pro-Kremlin" hackers_ after its lawmakers designated Russia a state sponsor of terrorism_ the institute's president said.

The parliament's website was up again shortly after 1700 GMT_ around two hours after the institution had reported the outage.

"The European Parliament is under a sophisticated cyberattack. A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility_" European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said in a tweet shortly after the website went down.

"This_ after we proclaimed Russia as a State-sponsor of terrorism. My response: SlavaUkraini (glory to Ukraine)"_ she said.

The outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack_ which works by directing high volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid by so-called "hacktivists" to knock them offline.

These attacks usually don't cause much damage.

A spokesperson for the parliament did not immediately respond to questions regarding any damage.

Earlier on Wednesday_ lawmakers voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism_ arguing Moscow's military strikes on civilian targets such as energy infrastructure_ hospitals_ schools and shelters violated international law.

The move is largely symbolic_ as the European Union does not have a legal framework in place to back it up. At the same time_ the bloc has already imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.