Cyberattacks hit Danish central bank, 7 private lenders

COPENHAGEN, Denmark

The official websites of Denmark’s central bank and seven other private lenders were hit by cyberattacks this week, according to bank representatives.

The seven other banks that came under cyberattack included Jyske Bank, Sparekassen Sjælland-Fyn, Skjern Bank, Ringkjobing Landbobank, Djurslands Bank and Kreditbanken.

In a statement, the Jyske Bank said that the bank suffered a “motivated attack” that looked like a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack intended to limit the bank websites’ operations.

The bank expressed its suspicion that the attack “apparently originated in Russia,” saying that they are closely monitoring the situation while collecting more information.

Danske Bank said that it also suffered a cyberattack on Jan 10. Lance McGrath, head of security at the bank, said: "We noticed yesterday's attack, which all in all had an extremely limited effect. A few customers outside the Nordics experienced a technical error yesterday when trying to access our international website, but we saw no impact and our business and customer systems were running unaffected."

McGrath claimed that the Killnet group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Killnet is a loosely affiliated group of volunteer hackers that has launched a series of attacks against various organizations in Ukraine and countries that sides with Ukraine since February 2022.