UPDATE: Russian cell operators escape virus-encoder attacks, work normally

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MOSCOW, Oct 25 (PRIME) -- Major Russian mobile operators were not attacked by the BadRabbit virus-encoder and are working normally, the companies’ spokespeople told PRIME on Wednesday.

“MTS’ resources resist attacks of different levels daily, and we fight them back successfully,” a spokesperson for the country’s biggest operator said.

MegaFon, VimpelCom, and T2 RTK Holding function as usual as well.

Ilya Sachkov, general director of Group-IB, a company investigating high-tech cybercrimes and fraud, said BadRabbit attacked local mass media on Tuesday and tried to hit banks out of the top 20.

“Group-IB registered efforts to infect infrastructure of a number of Russian banks, which use the system of interference detection with the virus. These files got there on Tuesday from 1 p.m. till 3 p.m. Moscow time. This virus was aimed at banks as well,” Sachkov said.

The situation showed a higher quality of banks’ protection against cyberattacks than of companies of the non-banking sector, he said.

Antivirus software maker Kaspersky Lab said earlier that attacks were more intensive in Russia than in Germany, Turkey, and Ukraine.

The Russian central bank also said it has registered a computer attack with the use of BadRabbit, but resources of financial organizations have not been compromised.

“The central bank will analyze the causes of a situation when a public service on issuer information disclosure of news agency Interfax is unavailable and intends to elaborate mechanisms to reduce probability of similar incidents in the future,” the regulator said.

Perpetrators are still trying to distribute malware, including encoding programs. They usually send an e-mail with an enclosed virus and entice a user to open the file, which activates the virus, the central bank said.

A source close to the regulator said that uploading of malware redirects the user to servers distributing the virus under the guise of legal software.

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