Dutch authorities are investigating a major disruption to train traffic in the Netherlands on the opening day of the NATO summit — an incident that one senior official said could be sabotage.
A power outage early on Tuesday has disrupted some traffic to and from the Netherlands’ main airport Schiphol, located 50 kilometers from where leaders of the Western defense alliance NATO are gathering today and tomorrow.
Around 30 cables were damaged due to a fire, local media reported. The damaged cables have impacted the trains running from Amsterdam, Schiphol and Utrecht stations.
Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel on Tuesday said the disruption “could be sabotage.”
“[Sabotage] is one of the things we are now investigating,” he told broadcaster NOS at the Public Forum ahead of the NATO leaders’ meetings. “Then the question is: Who is behind it? It can be an activist group, it can be a country. It can be many things,” he said.
Van Weel served as NATO’s most senior hybrid and cybersecurity official until the middle of last year.
Officials at Dutch railway provider ProRail and public authorities are still investigating the incident.
The train disruptions are the most recent disruption to events in the Netherlands, after Dutch municipalities on Monday already faced a series of low-level cyberattacks.
A wave of distributed denial-of-service attacks hit a dozen Dutch organizations, including several municipalities, the National Cyber Security Centre confirmed. The attacks did not result in data breaches or intrusions, authorities said.
Dutch cyber authorities pointed to the pro-Russian hacktivist group NoName057(16), which claimed the attacks. The group has targeted NATO countries including Belgium, Romania and others in the past year with such DDoS attacks, seeking to influence how countries position themselves toward NATO and the war in Ukraine.
The attacks fit the description of threats outlined by Dutch authorities ahead of the NATO summit. While not very sophisticated, they appeared aimed at sowing confusion and stretching the capacity of public sector institutions involved in organizing the summit.
Threat intelligence firm Recorded Future last week warned that the NATO summit in The Hague was expected to draw intense interest from Russian and Chinese threat operatives, with defense infrastructure and logistics providers likely to be top targets for espionage and sabotage.
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