IOTW: Italian banks hit with DDoS attacks

A number of banks across Italy have been taken offline due to targeted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN) said on August 1 that it had detected cyber attacks against at least five banks across the country. These attacks temporarily took some of the bank’s services offline.

The banks impacted by the DDoS attacks included BPER Banca (EMII.MI), Intesa Sanpaolo (ISP.MI), FinecoBank (FBK.MI), Popolare di Sondrio (BPSI.MI) and Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS.MI).

According to the ACN, it “identified the reactivation of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack campaigns by pro-Russian...groups against national institutional subjects”. The ACN said that Russian hacking gang, NoName, was responsible for the attacks.

An employee at one of the banks impacted by the cyber attacks told Reuters that the bank’s website was taken offline due to an heavy influx of traffic, however its mobile app continued to function normally during the attack and the website came back online after a short period of time. 

The ACN said that it had provided assistance to all those impacted by the DDoS attacks launched by NoName.

What are DDoS attacks?

Distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS attacks, see malicious actors attempt to disrupt a site by overwhelming its infrastructure with a large amount of internet traffic. As DDoS attacks overwhelm a site’s bandwidth, users are prevented from accessing it.

DDoS attacks can be launched for a number of reasons, but are primarily used to cause disruption by forcing websites offline. The disruptive nature of DDoS attacks means they are used by malicious actors as a way of directly targeting specific individuals or companies.