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Anonymous begins monthlong hacking campaign against banks, starting with Greece

The hacking collective targeted the Central Bank of Greece's website on Tuesday with a DDoS attack.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
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Anonymous uses the Guy Fawkes mask as its logo.

Getty Images/EyeEm

Greece has become the first country to have the website of its central bank targeted by online activist collective Anonymous in what looks set to be a month-long hacking campaign.

The bank's website was disrupted for a short period on Tuesday after being targeted with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. "The attack lasted for a few minutes and was successfully tackled by the bank's security systems," a Bank of Greece official told Reuters.

The website, on which the bank's policies are outlined, was the only part of its service that was affected in the attack and it was quickly back up and running.

In a YouTube video in which the collective claims responsibility for the attack, Anonymous also promises that it "marks the start of a 30-day campaign against central bank sites across the world." Other countries to be targeted through the campaign, which Anonymous is referring to as "#OpIcarus - Shut Down the Banks" include the UK, the US, China, Pakistan and Iran.

Anonymous detailed its reasoning behind the campaign in a separate video released at the end of March.

The Bank of Greece did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.