[zokier]

Just to be absolutely clear, that YLE news article that OP linked does not mention the Citizens Initiatives platform at all. It reports only an attack against one bank (banks are popular authentication providers in Finland). There are total of 10 different banks providing authentication for the Citizens Initiatives platform, and additionally two non-banking based authentication options.

[usr1106]

Agree. The submission sounds more like a conspiracy theory. Why does the submitter needs to write a news article? Because there is no source to cite (the given link is absolutely not a source for what the submitter claims, probably everyone can understand that even if over 999/1000 readers need machine translation to do so).

It's was already in today's printed newspaper that the parliament will put NATO membership on the session agenda. Nordea is the biggest bank in Finland so there could be all kind of reasons to DDoS them. But not having more people sign the petition seems a far-fetched one. Polls show that support to join raised from 30% in January to 53% in the last poll. The last poll started already before Putin's attack and especially the news that this time Europe does not only watch and make some symbolic declarations, so one can easily assume that support has gone up since then.

Should it become mainline news that this attack was directed against signing the petition, support will go up further.

My feeling is bringing down the petition site would be much easier than the bank that many but far from all potential sginers need for authentication. The petition site is little used after all and has not gained much attention before, certainly not internationally. 50,000 signers needed. Over 90% of the petitions get just a small fraction of that during the 6 months a petition can be supported. Nordea bank handles that many customers in just a couple of hours every day and they have been target of DDoS before.