MOSCOW, March 18, /ITAR-TASS/. Anti-virus experts warn about the rising activity of hackers against online banking sites, increasingly facing DDoS attacks along with hacking.

“Wrongdoers use banking Trojan programmes to discredit banks’ sites and steal users’ money. Many banks’ online resources also face hacking and DDos attacks,” leading virus analyst of ESET international company Artyom Baranov told Itar-Tass.

As a rule, DDoS makes web resources unavailable for several hours, then the site works as before, Baranov said. For this purpose hackers also use botnet - a large number of computers contaminated with a malicious code. Cybercriminals can use this code to launch DDoS attacks from computers of unwitting users.

“DDoS attacks have been hackers’ weapon of choice,” said the press office of the Kaspersky Lab. Practically anyone in Russia, under certain circumstances and with insignificant costs can get an operational service to commit a cybercrime, yet protection against DDoS is a hard and, accordingly, costly task. The recent attacks on sites of banks and other organizations are an example of hacktivism, a means to express political and social protest, the lab said.

Last week's attack of the site of the Central Bank of Russia was followed by attacks on VTB-24 and Alfa-Bank on Monday afternoon. VTB-24 has quickly restored its information systems.