Lithuania’s parliamentary website came under cyber attack yesterday (11 April) just as a special session of the World Congress of Crimean Tartars was meeting to discuss mass violations of human Rights in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The website was blocked partly preventing live coverage of discussions. Lithuanian police claim the attack came from abroad.

According to Baltic Course, the cyber attack was aimed at preventing foreign viewers from watching the global gathering of the Tatar community.

Lithuanian parliamentary officials eventually managed to notify foreign users of alternative broadcasting channels.

Parliamentary Speaker Loreta Grauziniene said that this was the first attack, on such a scale, against the parliament.

Rimtautas Cerniauskas, the head of Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center, said the situation was currently under control, with security measures applied.

“The Seimas [Parliament’s] website has been under the DDoS attack since 5PM local time on Saturday, we managed it to the extent to satisfy specialists of the Seimas. We applied security measures to make put the website back in operation, the measures are never ideal – they always hinder something else,” Cerniauskas said.

“The attacks come from around the world. If there was a statement to the police, we would start identifying the country. We are working to manage the incident,” he added.

Kyiv’s main airport was recently the victim of a cyber attack.