Expert: Russian banks face DDoS attack wave first time in 2016

MOSCOW, Nov 10 (PRIME) -- A hacker raid against Russia’s biggest banks, started on Tuesday, has become the first large-scale DDoS attack wave in 2016, antivirus genius Kaspersky Lab said late Wednesday.

Hackers opened attacks on Tuesday at 4 p.m. Moscow time and were still active late on Wednesday, Kaspersky Lab said. A source close to the central bank said earlier that the country’s top five banks had been facing minor DDoS attacks since Tuesday.

DDoS attacks imply external influence on banks’ systems aimed at their overload. They can halt banks’ operations. The last massive wave of attacks was registered in October 2015.

Attacks lasted on average for about an hour each, and the strongest was almost 12 hour long. Several banks confronted attacks, which reached 660,000 requests per second.

Hackers used botnets, networks of infected devices consisting of over 24,000 machines. More than half of devices were located in the U.S., India, Taiwan and Israel. Machines from more than 30 countries participated in the attacks, Kaspersky Lab said.

Sberbank and Alfa-Bank confirmed DDoS attacks. “Online resources of Sberbank saw powerful DDoS attacks on November 8. The attacks were organized via botnets, uniting tens of thousands of machines, which are scattered across several dozen of counties,” a Sberbank spokesperson said.

“The attack was rather short and weak. It did not undermine the work of Alfa-Bank’s business systems,” a bank spokesperson said.

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