Germany issues fresh warning to banks of cyber attacks due to Ukraine war

FRANKFURT (Reuters) -The German financial regulator BaFin issued a fresh cyber security warning on Tuesday to the nation's financial sector due to the war in Ukraine following a recent increase in cyber attacks.

BaFin has repeatedly warned about cyber attacks but Tuesday's security notice marks an escalation of its concerns.

"In recent days there have been repeated attacks on IT infrastructure," BaFin said.

BaFin said the recent events had especially taken the form of 'distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)' attacks, in which hackers attempt to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, launched on Feb. 24, has caused a serious deterioration in its relations with the West. Moscow denies Western accusations of involvement in cyber attacks.

(Reporting by Tom Sims and Frank SiebeltEditing by Madeline Chambers and Gareth Jones)