Pro-Russian Hackers Claim Cyberattacks on Italian Banks

   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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