Pro-Russian Hackers Claim Cyberattacks on Italian Banks
August 02 2023 - 11:56AM
Dow Jones News
By Mauro Orru
Pro-Russian hackers said they targeted the website of an Italian
on Wednesday, adding to attacks from Tuesday against at least six
other banks in the country.
NoName057(16), a collective of Russian-speaking hackers, claimed
responsibility for targeting Banca Popolare di Bari, writing on one
of its Telegram channels that the bank's website hadn't withstood
the attack on Wednesday. The website was down Wednesday afternoon.
Banca Popolare di Bari didn't immediately respond to a request for
comment.
The hacking group on Tuesday claimed attacks on the websites of
several other banks, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy's largest
bank by assets; Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena; BPER Banca; Banca
Popolare di Sondrio; FinecoBank and Mediobanca Banca di Credito
Finanziario's CheBanca.
A spokesman for Intesa described the hack as a distributed
denial-of-service, or DDoS, a type of attack that floods a targeted
website with junk traffic to make it inoperable. A Mediobanca
representative said CheBanca had promptly intercepted the threat,
and it had restored its website within half an hour and that this
type of attack didn't result in any data loss. A BPER Banca
spokesman said the group had effectively countered the attack and
restored operations within a few hours, adding that there was no
breach of customer data.
Monte dei Paschi, Banca Popolare di Sondrio and FinecoBank
didn't respond to requests for comment. Although it is unclear how
much of an impact the hacking group had on the different sites,
some customers took to social media on Tuesday to ask the banks why
their websites weren't operational.
SentinelLabs, part of U.S. cybersecurity firm SentinelOne,
identified NoName057(16) as yet another hacking group to emerge
following the war in Ukraine that has been conducting DDoS attacks
on the country and members of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization that support Kyiv in its fight against Russian
forces.
"While not technically sophisticated, they can have an impact on
service availability-even when generally short lived," SentinelLabs
said earlier this year.
Bruno Frattasi, director general of Italy's National
Cybersecurity Agency, said the banks targeted by the recent DDoS
attacks reacted well overall as no material damage or compromise of
customer data was reported.
The agency's computer emergency response team alerted the banks
from the very first minutes of the attacks, allowing a prompt
reaction on their part, he said.
Write to Mauro Orru at mauro.orru@wsj.com; @MauroOrru94
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 02, 2023 11:41 ET (15:41 GMT)
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