The attacks disrupted the banks’ websites and caused them to crash, although client information was spared, a police official revealed.
Advertisement
A hacking group dubbing itself the Armada Collective has claimed responsibility for striking three Greek banks with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and has threatened to continue to do so unless paid a ransom.
Ekathimerini.com reported yesterday that threats had been made by hackers against a number of Greek banks, demanding ransom payments to the tune of 50 bitcoins – now worth close to $19,000.
The police official clarified that the money was not given, but the hackers did not manage to have access to the bank accounts as the electronic safety systems were activated. Only this time, the banks had strengthened their defence, so thanks to this, no actual disruptions of service took place.
The banks had refused to pay up and alerted the security services and the Greek central bank, which are investigating.
The attack comes less than a week after a similar thing happened to UAE-based bank, when a hacker going by the name Hacker Buba, blackmailed the bank and asked for $3 million.
Advertisement
“These attacks now disproportionately affect organizations that can not or have not deployed DDoS mitigation solutions, which are by and large effective against most of these attacks”, said Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of Cybersecurity Strategy at Proofpoint to SCMagazine Tuesday in an email. ProtonMail, an encrypted email start-up set up by CERN researchers in Geneva, was targeted earlier this month. At the same time they used to demand quite small ransom – in most cases equivalent of only a few thousand pounds – which is “a level where there’s a temptation just to pay it and make it go away”. HushMail, VFEMail and RunBox were also hit within days of the attacks.
