Swiss Financial Center knocked offline by Russian hackers

The pro-Russian hacker group responsible for a string of attacks against Switzerland's critical infrastructure this week has now hit the nation's major banking institution, the Geneva Financial Center.

The cybercriminal gang No-Name claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel Thursday morning.

“Banged the portal of the Geneva financial center,” the group posted under a picture of a brown bear stamped with an image of a bear claw.

The image of a bear, assumed to represent its allegiance to Russia, is a signature image used by NoName when posting about its attacks on Telegram.

“Victory will be ours!” the post stated with an emoji of the Russian flag.

The Geneva Financial Center (GFC) is the umbrella association of the Swiss financial sector, representing 13% of Geneva's GDP.

It was created in 1991 by the 80 banks that were members of the Geneva stock exchange and employs roughly 35,000 individuals, according to the GFC.

Cybernews confirmed the Center's website was still offline Thursday evening, although an alternate website address to the GFC seemed to be loading without issues.

NoName has targeted the websites of multiple critical infrastructure entities this week by using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which overload a website with traffic requests, causing it to crash.

This week's victims included the Armed Forces of Switzerland, several Swiss federal government websites, and the online portal of the Swiss Federal Railways.

Switzerland's aviation sector was also hit hard with attacks on the Geneva International Airport, Bern regional airport, St. Grenchen, Gallen-Altenrhein, and Samedan airports, as well as airline companies Zimex Aviation and Heliswiss.

At the time of this report Cybernews found Zimex Aviation and St. Grenchen airport were still offline.

The group claims its attacks on the Swiss nations are in retaliation for Switzerland's support for Ukraine and EU sanctions against Russia.