Banking services of Rabobank, ABN Amro and ING were hit by cyberattacks when hackers targeted the said financial institutions with Distributed Denial of Services. Reports about the attack emerged when customers of Rabobank vented their ire on the bank’s website disruption through Twitter.
It was then the authorities of Rabobank reacted by first rendering an apology and then immediately released the details of the cyber attack.
As per the sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, ABN Amro and ING became victims of the DDoS on Friday night last week. But their websites were brought back to normal by the early hours of Monday. Whereas, Rabobank became a victim of a cyber attack on Sunday when customers discovered that they could not log-into the co-op bank’s websites for banking services. This is when few of the twitter users tweeted the bank officials to alert them to the issue.
The only best part of this attack is that the officials of Rabobank were ready with a disaster recovery plan. So, they immediately initiated the business continuity plan which kept the downtime minimum.
Intelligence officials from the Netherlands suspect the hand of Russian hacking group called Fancy Bear/Cozy Bear behind the attack. The cyber attack could have been a response in retaliation to Dutch AIVD Intelligence Service 2014 media revelation that Russian hackers conducted attacks on the US Democratic National Committee in the run-up to US Elections 2016.
Kees Verhoeven, an MP specializing in digital and cyber issues and leading member of the D66 party in the governing coalition admitted that his nation has become a target of cyber attacks coming from Russian Intelligence. But he also added that his nation was strong enough to thwart such attacks of any scale in the current cyber landscape.
