Hungarian banks and telecommunications companies saw their services disrupted after a powerful DDoS attack took place last Thursday. According to Hungarian telecommunications company “Magyar Telekom”, the attack was carried out from servers located in Russia, China and Vietnam.
What do we mean by the term “DDoS attack”?
DDos, or distributed denial-of-service, is an attack that occurs on a computer or network, preventing users from accessing a system's resources, while hackers attempt to load a network with unusually high volumes of data, aiming to "crash" it. This is a type of attack that is most successful when coordinated by botnets, making it even more powerful.
DDos attacks are among the 5 most dangerous types of cyberattacks, since in order to be completely successful, the attacker must have under his control a network of computers, which is called a zombie net or botnet. To become zombies, they must be infected with a virus, such as trojans, and become bots - zombies.
When the attacker finds his target, all the computers under the hacker, and all of them, together as a network, simultaneously overload a website with high-bandwidth connections, resulting in the server being unable to handle so many connections and thus, it "crashes" and becomes unavailable.
Magyar Telekom reported that the volume of data traffic in this DDoS attack was 10 times higher than the volume typically seen in DDoS attacks, leading the company to conclude that this was one of the largest hacking attacks to have taken place in Hungary to date, considering both its size and complexity.
Hackers from Russia, China and Vietnam attempted to carry out a DDoS attack targeting Hungarian banks and telecommunications companies, after also attempting to “hit” Magyar Telekom’s networks.
The attack, which took place in several waves, disrupted the services of some banks in the country and caused disruptions in Magyar Telekom services in parts of the capital Budapest, before the company repelled the attack.
Hungarian bank OTP Bank has confirmed that it has been affected by the attack. Specifically, the bank stated that a DDoS attack was carried out on Thursday on telecommunications systems that serve some of its banking services. However, as the bank pointed out, it managed to repel the hackers’ attempt in cooperation with Telekom, which was also affected. Thus, the brief interruption in some of its services ended on Thursday afternoon.
