Massive cyberattack hit five top Russian banks: Kaspersky
Massive cyberattack hit five top Russian banks: Kaspersky
Germain Moyon AFP November 10, 2016
Moscow (AFP) - A massive cyberattack has hit at least
five of Russia's largest banks, Moscow-based internet security giant Kaspersky
said Thursday.
The country's largest lender, state-controlled Sberbank,
said it had been hacked into on Tuesday but managed to neutralise the attack
automatically without disturbing its operations.
Kaspersky said in a statement that the distribution of
denial attacks (DDoS) began Tuesday at 1300 GMT and targeted "the websites
of at least five well-known financial institutions in the top 10" in
Russia.
The attacks were still continuing on Thursday. Most
lasted around one hour but the longest lasted almost 12 hours, Kaspersky said.
DDoS attacks involve flooding websites with more traffic
than they can handle, making them difficult to access or taking them offline
entirely.
These attacks saw as many as 660,000 requests being sent
per second using a network of more than 24,000 hijacked devices located in 30
countries. More than half the devices were in the United States, India, Taiwan
and Israel, Kaspersky said.
Contacted by AFP, Russia's central bank confirmed that it
had identified "attacks on a number of large banks," describing their
intensity as "medium" and saying they did not disrupt access to
banking services.
It said the attacks used botnets made up of the
"Internet of things" -- electronic devices such as CCTV cameras or
digital video recorders plugged in to offices and homes worldwide.
A senior executive at Sberbank, Stanislav Kuznetsov, told
Interfax news agency that the bank had suffered 68 such attacks this year and
that the latest was among the biggest.
Kaspersky said that DDoS attacks "have long been one
of the most popular instruments used by criminals to attack businesses."
Such attacks have grown more frequent in recent years
with the development of online banking but also in the context of heightened
tensions over the crisis in Ukraine with attackers targeting the sites of the
Kremlin and NATO.
Most recently Washington accused Russia of using
cyberattacks against the Democratic Party to attempt to disrupt this week's
presidential election.
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