ROME (Reuters) - Italy's cyber security agency on Tuesday said it had detected hacker attacks against websites of at least five banks, which temporarily made it impossible to access some of their services.
A spokesperson for the agency told Reuters that targeted banks included Intesa Sanpaolo (BIT:ISP), Monte dei Paschi di Siena and BPER Banca, along with FinecoBank and Banca Popolare di Sondrio.
The agency "identified the reactivation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack campaigns by pro-Russian ... groups against national institutional subjects," a statement said.
In DDoS attacks, hackers attempt to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it.
A source at one of the banks targeted in the attack said that their site crashed because of heavy traffic but only for a short period of time, and the mobile app worked regularly instead allowing clients to operate.
The agency said it provided swift assistance to the firms targeted by attacks from activists in the Noname057(16) group in order to mitigate any impact.