Germany Issues Fresh Warning to Banks of Cyber Attacks Due to Ukraine War

The logo of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin (Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) is pictured outside an office building of the BaFin in Bonn, Germany, April 15, 2019. (Reuters)
The logo of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin (Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) is pictured outside an office building of the BaFin in Bonn, Germany, April 15, 2019. (Reuters)
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Germany Issues Fresh Warning to Banks of Cyber Attacks Due to Ukraine War

The logo of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin (Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) is pictured outside an office building of the BaFin in Bonn, Germany, April 15, 2019. (Reuters)
The logo of Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin (Bundesanstalt fuer Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) is pictured outside an office building of the BaFin in Bonn, Germany, April 15, 2019. (Reuters)

The German financial regulator BaFin issued a fresh cyber security warning on Tuesday to the nation's financial sector due to the war in Ukraine following a recent increase in cyber attacks.

BaFin has repeatedly warned about cyber attacks but Tuesday's security notice marks an escalation of its concerns.

"In recent days there have been repeated attacks on IT infrastructure," BaFin said.

BaFin said the recent events had especially taken the form of 'distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)' attacks, in which hackers attempt to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyze it.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, launched on Feb. 24, has caused a serious deterioration in its relations with the West. Moscow denies Western accusations of involvement in cyber attacks.



Amazon Doubles Down on AI Startup Anthropic with $4 bln Investment

The logo of Amazon is seen on the door of an Amazon Books retail store in New York City, US, February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The logo of Amazon is seen on the door of an Amazon Books retail store in New York City, US, February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
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Amazon Doubles Down on AI Startup Anthropic with $4 bln Investment

The logo of Amazon is seen on the door of an Amazon Books retail store in New York City, US, February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The logo of Amazon is seen on the door of an Amazon Books retail store in New York City, US, February 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic said on Friday it has raised an additional $4 billion investment from longtime backer Amazon.com, bringing the e-commerce giant's total investment to $8 billion, underscoring Big Tech's growing genAI investments.

Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor, the company said. Its AWS unit will also be Anthropic's official cloud provider.

Anthropic also said it is working with AWS' Annapurna Labs on the development of future generations of Amazon's Trainium chips and plans to train its foundational models on the hardware, Reuters reported.

Britain's competition regulator had said in September Amazon's partnership with Anthropic will not be referred for a deeper probe as it did not fall under its jurisdiction.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time.