Australian banks are getting focused by a team threatening to start denial-of-company assaults until a ransom is compensated, the Australian Cyber Security Centre suggests.

The marketing campaign is getting waged by attackers claiming to be from Silence, a Russian-speaking highly developed persistent danger (APT) team that commonly targets banks and financial institutions.

The ACSC claimed it had been “unable to verify” the claims of affiliation.

The centre did counsel, nonetheless, that several threats had been a short while ago gained.

“The ACSC is mindful of a range of DoS for ransom threats getting designed against Australian organisations, mainly in the banking and finance sector,” it claimed on Tuesday night.

“The threats in issue are shipped by way of e mail, and threaten the recipient with a sustained DoS attack until a sum of the Monero cryptocurrency is compensated.”

The centre claimed it had so considerably gained “no reports of the threats eventuating in DoS”.

In addition, it claimed it is “aware of a range of DoS threats designed in the earlier against Australian organisations that did not eventuate.”

Silence has been thoroughly investigated by the Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB, which claimed in August very last calendar year that the team had “significantly expanded their geography and greater the frequency of their attacks”.

Silence in the beginning focused “post-Soviet states and neighbouring countries”, in accordance to Group-IB, with Asia appearing to be particularly desirable.

The team utilized phishing e-mail to infect victims, but also utilized e mail strategies to examination the validity of e mail addresses and to “get information about the cybersecurity options utilized by a focused corporation all the even though remaining undetected,” Group-IB claimed.