Russia’s Rostelecom fights back DDoS attacks on 5 big banks Mon

MOSCOW, Dec 9 (PRIME) -- Russian state-controlled telecom operator Rostelecom fought back on Monday DDoS attacks against five local biggest banks and financial organizations, the operator said on Friday.

“The analysis of attacks, carried out by Rostelecom’s specialists, revealed that a part of traffic was generated from home routers of users, which are considered as IoT devices. A specific feature of the attacks was that they were organized via devices supporting CWMP (TR-069),” Muslim Medzhlumov, director of the cybersecurity center at Rostelecom, said.

“Several weeks ago, in the realization of this protocol on devices of certain manufacturers, a serious vulnerability was found, allowing fraudsters to form a botnet to organize DDoS attacks.”

German big operator Deutsche Telecom and Irish provider Eircom were also attacked by hackers via home devices earlier in December, Medzhlumov said.

The Federal Security Service said on its Web site on December 2 that foreign special services were preparing large-scale cyberattacks against the Russian financial system, including its biggest banks, starting from Monday.

Control centers behind the attacks were located in the Netherlands and belonged to Ukrainian company BlazingFast, the security service said, adding that it was taking measures to neutralize threats for the economic and information security.

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