Fiducia & GAD IT, a German company that provides IT services to many of the nation’s co-operative banks has been hit by a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

DDoS attacks aim to overload a website by firing huge amounts of requests at it from multiple machines until it is forced to crash.

The IT provider has over 6,500 staff, spread across officers in Karlsruhe, Münster, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin and has an annual turnover of around €1.5 billion.

Fiducia & GAD said the attack began at 10am CET on Thursday morning, causing the websites of many of the co-operative banks throughout Germany to become temporarily inaccessible.

The IT provider said that the situation had stabilised by the afternoon, but that the attacks continued in the evening.

Fiducia & GAD confirmed that self-service terminals were not affected and can still be used by bank customers but did not disclose how many banks were impacted.

DDos attacks have remained a consistently important attack vector for cyber criminals and continue to impact even the largest organisations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) fought off one of the largest ever DDoS attacks in June 2020, while in the UK the Labour Party experienced some disruption to its campaign delivery because of a DDoS attack in December 2019.

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