A powerful DDoS attack hit Hungarian banks and telecoms services

Hungarian financial institutions and telecommunications infrastructure were hit by a powerful DDoS attack originating from servers in Russia, China and Vietnam

A powerful DDoS attack hit some Hungarian banking and telecommunication services that briefly disrupted them. According to telecoms firm Magyar Telekom, the attack took place on Thursday and was launched from servers in Russia, China and Vietnam.

Magyar Telekom revealed that the attack was very powerful, it is one of the biggest cyberattacks that ever hit Hungary.

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

“That means that this was one of the biggest hacker attacks in Hungary ever, both in its size and complexity.” reads a statement issued by the company.

“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 distributed denial of service attack was able to disrupt the services of some of the banks in the country causing temporary interruptions in Magyar Telekom’s services in certain parts of the capital, Budapest.

The cyber attack was also confirmed by the Hungarian bank OTP Bank in a statement.

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

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

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Hungary)