Germany's cybersecurity agency probes 'scope and source' of attacks by hackers targeting websites

  • Interior ministry spokesman said the agency, the BSI, is investigating
  • DDoS attacks work by directing high traffic at a site's server to try to shut it down

By LAURENCE DOLLIMORE and HARRY HOWARD and SAM TONKIN

Published: | Updated:

Germany's federal cyber agency is looking into digital attacks by hackers targeting websites in the country.

The BSI is looking into the 'scope and source' of attacks, an interior ministry spokesperson said on Wednesday.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks work by directing high volumes of internet traffic towards targeted servers in a relatively unsophisticated bid by so-called 'hacktivists' to knock them offline. 

The investigation comes amid heightened fears about hackers around the world, with a recent report claiming that Russia was behind a cyber attack on Royal Mail that forced the postal groups to halt international deliveries. 

Germany's federal cyber agency is looking into digital attacks by hackers targeting websites in the country

Germany's federal cyber agency is looking into digital attacks by hackers targeting websites in the country

And last week, millions of T-Mobile customers in the United States had their personal data stolen after an 'unidentified malicious intruder' hacked the mobile giant's network - its second major security beach in just two years.

The company told the Security and Exchange Commission the breach was discovered on January 5 and said the data stolen included customers' addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth.

Based on its investigation to date, the breach did not expose passwords, Pins, bank account or credit card details, Social Security numbers or other government IDs.

It comes after Microsoft services including Outlook and Teams were hit by a global networking outage today. 

Thousands of users reported that they were left without email and communication services - as well as use of cloud platform Azure - after the issue. 

Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was occurring with devices across the Microsoft WAN. 

This impacts connectivity between clients on the internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centres, it said.

MicrosoftGermany

Most watched News videos

Comments 5

Share what you think

The comments below have not been moderated.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.