MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. One in six Russian companies faced DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks in 2015, according to a recent study by the Kaspersky Laboratory presented on Wednesday/

"In 2015, 17% of companies in Russia experienced DDoS-attacks, while in 2014 it was 18%," - Yury Namestnikov, an expert with the Kaspersky Lab said at the presentation of the study.

"During the year we registered about 120,000 attacks targeting about 68,000 websites in 96 countries," - the expert said.

According to the study, in Russia cyber criminals most often attacked medium and large businesses.

In 2015, 20% of large corporations and 17% of medium and small businesses faced DDoS-attacks. Among small companies (number of employees up to 25 people) only 12% of respondents reported about cyber-attacks.

According to the study, in 55% cases attacks were aimed at disabling the official websites of companies, while 34% of attacks were aimed at communications services and 23% attacks affected customers access to the system. 18% DDoS-attacks targeted file servers and 12% - services for financial transactions.

In general, the Russian websites rank fifth in the world in terms of the frequency of attacks. Chinese websites top the list, accounting for 41% of the world of DDoS-attacks.

The US, South Korea and Canada rank second, third and fourth respectively.

Most frequently attacks are initiated by Chinese and Russian hackers.

The analyst of the Kaspersky Lab said that in future, cybercriminal will target "Internet of Things" more frequently. He said that the routers, "smart" toys, surveillance cameras, as well as entire systems of "smart home" which rub on Linux operating system were attacked only slightly less than the devices, which run on Windows.

"DDoS-attack is now an application tool which is the process of committing more complex and large-scale attacks. Online extortionists are becoming more active again, although they have always been there," - Alexander Vurasko, an expert at the K department at the Interior Ministry said.

He said that, the DDoS-attack on the website of the Mail of Russia company in December 2015 was "one step from the attacks on critical information resources of the state." In order to combat cybercrime an effective partnership between the state, business and society should be established, Vurasko said.

DDoS-attack involves hacking activities, which lead to a partial or complete disabling of services, or to the difficulty of access to these services.