Coordinated DDoS Campaign Disrupts Five European Banks

Five major European banks experienced sustained service disruptions this week as a coordinated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign overwhelmed their public-facing customer portals.

The affected institutions — spanning Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Belgium — collectively serve more than 90 million retail customers. Online banking, mobile applications, and card-authorization APIs were intermittently unreachable during peak business hours on Monday and Tuesday.

A pro-Kremlin hacktivist group calling itself "NoName057(16)" claimed responsibility on its Telegram channel, framing the action as retaliation for renewed EU sanctions announced last week.

"The attacks were primarily Layer 7 HTTP floods, with some volumetric components reaching the low hundreds of Gbps," said Marie Vandenberg, head of DDoS response at the European Banking Federation's threat-sharing center. "What's notable is the coordination: identical attack signatures hit all five targets within minutes."

None of the banks reported loss of customer funds or data, and core transaction processing remained operational throughout. However, customer-service hotlines were overwhelmed as users sought to reach their accounts.

ENISA, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, issued an advisory urging financial-sector operators to validate their DDoS mitigation contracts and rehearse failover procedures with upstream transit providers.