At least five Italian banks have been targeted by cyber attackers, the country’s cyber security agency has said.

The Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN) on Tuesday said that it had detected hacker attacks against the websites of at least five banks, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, BPER Banca, FinecoBank, and Banca Popolare di Sondrio.

A statement from the ACN confirmed that it had "identified the reactivation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack campaigns by pro-Russian ... groups against national institutional subjects."

The DDoS attacks targeted the banks’ websites and flooded their network with high volumes of data in an effort to knock them offline. A source cited by Reuters at one of the banks said that their site briefly crashed because of heavy traffic, but that the company’s mobile app was unaffected by the attack.

The ACN identified activists in the Noname057(16) group as the source of the attack. The pro-Russian hacker group which first emerged in March 2022 has launched multiple similar attacks against Italian companies and institutions over the country's ongoing support of Ukraine's efforts in combating Russia's ongoing illegal invasion.

The group has also attacked sites in Ukraine, along with allied countries including the US, UK, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands.

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