A DDoS attack on the Bafin website has meant that it cannot be reached. According to the agency, it is working on a solution.
Frankfurt/Bonn (dpa) – The financial supervisory authority Bafin is struggling with the consequences of a hacker attack on its public website. “Due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the website of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin) has only been accessible to a limited extent since Friday, September 1, 2023,” the authority said on Monday on request.
Denial of Service – or DoS for short – means something like “making something inaccessible” or “putting it out of service”, as the Federal Office for Security and Information Technology explains. In the case of DoS attacks, a server is “deliberately bombarded with so many requests that the system can no longer cope with the tasks and, in the worst case, collapses”. In a DDoS attack, instead of individual systems, a large number of different systems are used in a large-scale, coordinated attack. As a rule, such attacks are not attacks in which the hackers manage to gain access to internal IT systems.
The Bafin had “taken security precautions and, immediately after the attack began, defensive measures were initiated that also worked,” said the financial regulator. However, these measures meant that the website was also temporarily unavailable on Monday. The Bafin is working intensively to restore full accessibility to its website, even while the attack is still ongoing. “All other Bafin systems work without restrictions,” emphasized the financial regulator.
Source: Stern
