Finnish bank takes cricket bat to wave after wave of DDoS varmints

When they were up, they were up, and when they were down...

Finnish bank OP is continuing to fight off a cascading series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that began on New Year's Eve.

OP was forced to restrict access to its services from outside the Nordic country as a result of the attack.

The motive for the attack, much less the perpetrators' identity, remain unclear. Unusually the attack is taking place over a time-span of days, rather than hours.

A previously unknown group is using social media to demand payment of a ransom in Bitcoins to call off the attack. CoreSecRUS's claims remain unverified.

The bank has set up a helpline for customers unable to access services online.

OP said that it had got on top of the attack on Sunday...

The denial-of-services attacks seem to be over now. We are paying close attention to the situation. We thank you for your patience. 2/2

— OP (@OP_Ryhma) January 4, 2015

... before a fresh flood of junk traffic once again rendered its services unavailable.

Denial-of services attacs seem to continue. Customers abroad may still have difficulties in logging in to OP's online services. 1/2

— OP (@OP_Ryhma) January 4, 2015

The above tweet was followed with contact details for customers affected by the outage.

Finnish police are investigating the attack, according to local reports. ®