UPDATE Earlier today, unknown hackers attacked the website of the Prague Public Transit Company (DPP) alongside with the websites of T-Mobile and O2, two Czech mobile phone operators.
It is the latest attack in what appears to be an organized and massive DDoS campaign against major Czech Internet websites over the past four days, between Monday 4 and Thursday 7 March, 2013.
The original story from Wednesday 6 March is here:
Prague - For the last three days, the Czech Internet has been facing organized attacks by hackers.
On Monday 4 March, the Czech Republic's major online newspapers - Idnes.cz, Lidovky.cz, Ihned.cz, among others - faced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks which made them temporarily unavailable in the morning. The following day, the Czech Internet giant, Seznam.cz, received the same treatment.
Today, the websites of the country's biggest banks - including Komercni Banka, CSOB, Raiffeisenbank, Fio Bank, and Ceska Sporitelna - were all attacked in the same way, and most likely by the same attackers. The banks' websites and online banking systems went down, while their mobile banking services were also having technical difficulties. The website of the Prague Stock Exchange was also temporarily unavailable. Also attacked was the website of the Czech National Bank, the Czech Republic's central bank.
Komercni Banka and Fio Banka confirmed that they were facing DDoS attacks.
"Komercni Bank has registered a DDOS attack against its portals www.kb.cz and www.mojebanka.cz. There was no leak of any client information. Currently we are working intensively on countermeasures to put the service for our clients into operation again," said Komercni Banka spokeswoman Monika Klucova.
Ceska Sporitelna spokeswoman Kristyna Dolinek Havligerova and CSOB spokeswoman Lenka Havova confirmed that the banks' websites were attacked.
During the attack, it was not possible to pay with cards issued by the banks in question. The banks stressed that neither client data nor deposits were lost or threatened.
According to Tomas Charvat from Excello, a Czech provider of computer and internet security solutions, the events of the past three days have shown that the Czech Republic is an easy and unprotected target for hackers. "We cannot quickly react to attacks of this kind," Charvat told state Czech Television, adding that the Czech Internet has not sufficient experience with hacking attacks.
According to latest information, the attackers used Czech as well as foreign IP addresses.
