German arms maker Rheinmetall fights off cyberattack

German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall managed to fend off a large-scale cyberattack on Tuesday largely unscathed, according to the company.
The unidentified perpetrators behind the cyberattack tried to take down the company's IT systems. But only a Rheinmetall website operated by an external service provider was rendered temporarily unavailable, a Rheinmetall spokesman told dpa.
The cyberattack was apparently a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which attackers overwhelm their target's computer servers with a flood of data requests in an effort to paralyse them.
However, Rheinmetall's IT infrastructure appears to have remained stable. There were no other significant failures apart from the group website, the spokesman said.
"There is no indication that the internal Rheinmetall IT infrastructure might be affected by a possible breach. It does not appear that the [Rheinmetall] group will suffer any financial damage."
The weapons maker was newly added on Tuesday to the DAX, Germany's leading stock market index of blue-chip companies.
Analysts suspect that Rheinmetall was attacked by Kremlin-aligned hackers who targeted the company because of its role in supplying armoured personnel carriers and other heavy weapons to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.