OpIcarus: Hacktivists Shut Down Central Bank of Cyprus with DDoS Attack

OpIcarus has found another target and this time it’s the Central Bank of Cyprus.

A group of hacktivists shut down the official website of Central Bank of Cyprus earlier today for operation OpIcarus, an online operation aimed at targeting banking and financial institutes worldwide. Operation OpIcarus was launched in January 2016 and restarted in March 2016. The hacktivists behind the operation believe banks and financial giants are involved in corruption and to register their protest they had to take the war to a next level.

The DDoS attack was conducted earlier this morning when the bank’s website (centralbank.gov.cy) was forced to stay offline. It is unclear for how long the site remained down, however, the attackers shared a screenshot showing the site was down for 35minutes before saving the screenshot.

HackRead had a conversation with one of the attackers behind the attack who said that:

“The banks have been getting away with murder, fraud, conspiracy, war profiteering, money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels, have put millions of people out on the street without food or shelter and have successfully bought all our governments to help keep us silenced. We represent the voice of the voiceless. We are uniting to make a stand. The central banks which were attacked in recent days were attacked to remind people that the biggest threat we face to an open and free society is the banks. The bankers are the problem and OpIcarus is the solution.”

This is the second bank that came under fire since the relaunch of Oplcarus. On 3rd May 2016, the Bank of Greece had its website under series of DDoS attacks and stayed offline for several hours.

In the last couple of months, there has been a slight increase in cyber attacks on the banks, first it was the HSBC bank facing DDoS attack on the salary day and then Turkish banks faced cyber attacks disrupting credit card transactions across the country.

At the time of publishing this article, the Central Bank of Cyprus website was restored and available online. However, attackers plan to attack the site once again in coming days.