Finland’s biggest bank reports cyber-attack

Finland’s biggest bank reports cyber-attack


Sunday’s disruption followed a warning of fraudulent text messages sent in the OP bank’s name on Friday.

The OP Financial Group reported a cyberattack on its Osuuspankki website on Sunday. OP, which calls itself Finland’s largest financial group, had reported an undetermined disruption to its services on Sunday morning.

At that point, Lotta Ala-Kulju, Director of Communications at Osuuspankki, told the tabloid newspaper Iltalehti that the cause of the technical disruption was being clarified.

“This morning we discovered that the login page of the op.fi service had been the target of a cyberattack that caused a disruption. As a result, we shifted the entire service to a maintenance state and investigated the matter,” Teemu Ylhäisi, Chief Information Security Officer of the OP Financial Group, told the Finnish news agency STT.

In the afternoon, OP said on Twitter that the attack had been averted and that online services were being restored. It added that other mobile services and payment cards were functioning normally.

Around 1.30pm the company said that a cyberattack had affected in logins to its site but that the online service was working normally again. It did not provide any more information about the attack.

“Our customers’ information and money have not been compromised, and all of OP’s services are now operating normally. We apologise for the inconvenience,” it said in a tweet.

According to STT, the disruption lasted from 6am until around 12.30pm.

On Friday, OP warned of phishing messages being sent to Finnish mobile phones, claiming to be from the bank and asking recipients to click on a link, supposedly to confirm a payment.