The government's Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) yesterday issued an alert to Bangladeshi banks, financial institutions and other organisations over possible cyber-attacks on August 15.

The alert was issued in response to a declaration made by some religious and ideologically motivated underground hacker groups on July 31 that they would launch a storm of cyber attacks against Bangladesh cyberspace on that day.

The alert is aimed at warning critical information infrastructures (CII), banks and financial institutions, health care and all government and private organisations of the possible cyber-attacks that may disrupt IT operations and businesses.

All organisations have been advised to be on alert for small to medium-scale cyber-attacks originating from the "hacktivist" groups, and to take the precautions to protect their infrastructures, according to a statement by CIRT.

CIRT reviews and desponds to computer security incidents and activities.

According to the statement, a hacker group on August 1 claimed to have carried out a cyber-attack on a payment gateway in Bangladesh and law enforcement and banking organisations. On July 3, a hacker group claimed a DDoS attack on Bangladeshi transportation service for one hour, making the website unavailable for the period.

On June 27, a hacker group defaced the website of a Bangladeshi government college and shared a web archive supporting their claims. On June 24, another hacker group defaced the website of a Bangladesh health organisation and shared a web archive supporting their claims.

On June 21, the group claimed a DDoS attack on the website of Bangladeshi military organisations. On June 20, the group claimed to have compromised a state-owned investment company, and took data of over 100,000 investors and investment applicants. The threat group shared a single screenshot as proof of compromise and planned to release the data.

CIRT requested all organisations in the country to take the some measures to ensure security of their infrastructures.

This include ensuring strict network and user activity monitoring 24/7, especially during non-office hours, watch out for any indication of data breach and ensuring implementing load balancer solutions to make sure that no single server is overwhelmed during an attack.