A massive cyberattack has hit at least five of Russia’s largest banks, Moscow-based internet security giant Kaspersky says.
The country’s largest lender, state-controlled Sberbank, said it had been hacked into on Tuesday but managed to neutralize the attack automatically without disturbing its operations.
Kaspersky says 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.
Eugene Kaspersky, head of Kaspersky Lab (Photo credit: Courtesy Tel Aviv University)
The attacks were still continuing on Thursday. Most lasted around one hour but the longest lasted almost 12 hours, Kaspersky says.
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.
— AFP
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