Russian banks suffered Powerful DDoS Attacks — Good news is that attacks were successfully mitigated.
On Tuesday afternoon, around five mainstream banks in Russia were targeted with two-days-long series of continuous DDoS attacks launched through a wide-scale botnet that involved 24,000 computer systems from 30 different countries. However, the banks managed to prevent the online client services from getting disrupted.
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A press release from one of the affected banks, the Sberbank, read:
“The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries. We registered the first attack early in the morning … the next attack in the evening involved several waves, each of them was twice as powerful as the previous one. Bank’s cybersecurity noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services.”
It has been revealed that the attack was huge and the intensity of the attacks kept on increasing with every attack. The attacks continued for two days uninterrupted.
Another bank called Alfabank received one of the weaker attacks. The bank’s representative stated:
“There was an attack, but it was relatively weak. It did not affect Alfabank’s business systems in any way.”
As per the analysis was done by the Russian computer security firm Kaspersky lab, over half of the botnets were located in the Israel, Taiwan, India and the USA. Every single wave of attack lasted for at least one hour and the longest of them all lasted for over 12 hours straight. The intensity of the attacks reached 660 thousands of requests per second. It is also noted that some of the banks were attacked repeatedly.
A statement from the Kaspersky Lab read:
“Such attacks are complex, and almost cannot be repelled by standard means used by internet providers.”
The Central Bank representative stated that the botnets not only involved computers but also the Internet of Things devices. According to security experts, these IoT devices included CCTV cameras mostly but the range was immensely wide as these also included appliances like microwaves.
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The reason why such appliances and other devices were turned into botnets so easily was that the owners never bother to make them well-protected by changing their default passwords while connecting them with the internet.
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