[BreachExchange] Hungarian banks, telecoms services briefly hit by cyber attack: Magyar Telekom

[Destry Winant]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hungary-cyber-idUSKBN26H0CB

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Some Hungarian banking and telecommunication
services were briefly disrupted by a powerful cyber attack on Thursday
launched from computer servers in Russia, China and Vietnam, telecoms
firm Magyar Telekom MTEL.BU said on Saturday.

The event was a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a cyber
attack in which hackers attempt to flood a network with unusually high
volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it.

The volume of data traffic in the attack was 10 times higher than the
amount usually seen in DDoS events, the company said.

“That means that this was one of the biggest hacker attacks in Hungary
ever, both in its size and complexity,” it said.

“Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese hackers tried to launch a DDoS attack
against Hungarian financial institutions, but they tried to overwhelm
the networks of Magyar Telekom as well,” the company added in a
statement.

The attack, which took place in several waves, disrupted the services
of some of the country’s banks and caused lapses in Magyar Telekom’s
services in certain parts of the capital, Budapest, before being
repelled by the company.

Hungarian bank OTP Bank OTPB.BU confirmed it had been affected by the attack.

“There was a DDoS attack on telecom systems serving some of the
banking services on Thursday,” the bank said.

“We repelled the attempt together with Telekom that was also affected
and the short disruption in some of our services ended by Thursday
afternoon.”