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VTB Bank was hit by the biggest cyber attack in its history, Russia's second-largest bank said on Tuesday.

It warns of temporary difficulties in accessing its mobile application and website, but assures its customers that their data remains safe, Reuters reported, quoted by BNR.

State-owned VTB said it was repelling a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, in which hackers try to flood the network with an unusually large volume of data traffic to paralyze it.

"The bank's technological infrastructure has been subjected to an unprecedented cyber attack from abroad," VTB said in a statement, adding that it was "the biggest cyber attack not only this year, but all the time since the bank has been operating."

Russian government entities and state-owned companies have come under attack over the military invasion of Ukraine, with the websites of the Kremlin, flagship carrier Aeroflot and major lender Sberbank among those experiencing outages or temporary access problems , reminds Reuters.

Hackers also delayed the start of President Vladimir Putin's speech at Russia's top economic forum earlier this year.

TASS was hit by a hacker attack

Meanwhile, pro-Russian hackers have claimed responsibility or been blamed for attacks on websites and infrastructure in Lithuania, Norway and the United States this year.

VTB said the majority of attacks came from abroad, but the bank was particularly concerned about artificial traffic from Russian IP addresses.

It also said it would hand over any identified Russian IP addresses to law enforcement.

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