Germany’s cybersecurity agency investigates ‘scope and source’ of hacker attacks

Germany’s federal cyber agency is investigating digital attacks by hackers targeting websites in the country.

The BSI is investigating the “scope and source” of the attacks, a Home Office spokesman said on Wednesday.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks work by directing large volumes of Internet traffic to specific servers in a relatively unsophisticated attempt by so-called “hacktivists” to take them offline.

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

And last week, millions of T-Mobile customers across the US had their personal data stolen after an ‘unidentified malicious intruder’ hacked into the mobile giant’s network, its second-biggest security beach in just two years. .

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

According to their investigation to date, the breach did not expose passwords, pins, bank account or credit card details, social security numbers or other government identification.

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

Thousands of users reported being left without communication and email services, as well as the use of the Azure cloud platform, after the issue.

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

This affects connectivity between clients on the Internet to Azure, as well as connectivity between services in data centers, he said.