Russian hackers claim cyberattack on website of Spanish company repairing tanks for Ukraine

A division of General Dynamics, the Spanish company Santa Barbara Systems, which is focused in Spain and repairs Leopard tanks for delivery to Ukraine, has suffered a cyber attack that affected the work of its website.

As reported by Reuters, a representative of General Dynamics in Germany said that the defence contractor is still analysing the cause of the website outage, adding that all its operations in Europe are going well.

The hacker group NoName claimed responsibility for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

DDoS attacks direct large volumes of Internet traffic to targeted servers to disable them.

"We sent our DDoS-missiles against websites in russophobic Spain," the group, which often targets countries that support Ukraine, wrote on Telegram on Tuesday.

Last month, NATO said Russia was behind a stepped-up campaign of hybrid attacks on companies and infrastructure in allied countries.

Santa Barbara assembles heavy equipment such as Leopard tanks and artillery equipment for the Spanish army, and is also involved in the restoration of mothballed Spanish Leopard tanks to be supplied to the Ukrainian army.

Last week, Spain announced €1 billion in military support for Ukraine this year, which, based on local media reports, includes 19 Leopard 2A4 tanks.

On 27 May, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed an agreement on security cooperation between Ukraine and Spain during his visit to Madrid.