Central Bank of Malta allegedly hit by DDoS attack, hacker group claims responsibility

The Central Bank of Malta’s (CBM) website was hard to reach throughout Monday as a group of hackers claimed responsibility for an alleged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the website.

The attack was allegedly conducted by Turk Hack Team (THT) which has claimed to have conducted a series of DDoS attacks against the CBM, and also the Swiss National Bank.

Whether the Central Bank was indeed subject to an attack remains to be officially confirmed, however this newsroom can confirm that as of this morning and throughout the afternoon, a ‘Host error’ message came up when trying to access the site. At around 4pm on Monday the site was again functioning normally.

The attack allegedly took place shortly before the group issued a warning to the Swiss Government on 18th June (yesterday) through its Telegram channel, threatening to attack the country’s critical infrastructure.

A DDoS attack maliciously disrupts access to a website by overwhelming the server/network with traffic to overload it, making it inaccessible to everyone else.

A commonly used analogy to describe what is happening is: imagine several people are trying to walk through a door at the same time, making it impossible for anyone to pass through.

This newsroom has reached out to the Central Bank of Malta to confirm whether it was in fact affected by a DDoS attack.