Russian Central Bank reports DDoS-attack on major banks
These were average-power attacks, according to the press service of the Central Bank
MOSCOW, November 10. /TASS/. The Russian Central Bank reported DDoS-attacks on a number of major banks and passed the information to the law enforcement authorities, press service of the Central Bank told TASS on Thursday.
Last Tuesday, Sberbank fought off a series of powerful DDoS-attacks organized from dozens of countries. According to Vedomosti, Alfa Bank, Moscow Bank (part of VTB), Rosbank, and the Moscow Exchange also faced similar attacks.
"Fincert (organization for combatting cybercrime - TASS) documents attacks on a number of major banks. Bot networks from the so-called Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices were involved in the attacks. These were average-power attacks. Availability of banks’ services was not compromised. The information was sent to the law enforcement authorities," press service of the Central Bank said.
According to Kaspersky Lab, hackers attacked websites of at least five prominent financial institutions of the top-10. This series of attacks was the first large-scale DDoS-wave this year, aimed at Russian banks.
Attackers used multi-vector SYN flood attacks (sends SYN requests to a target's system to consume enough server resources to make it unresponsive) and HTTP flood attacks (exploits HTTP GET or POST requests that mask as legitimate). "These are complex attacks that are virtually impossible to stop with standard tools available to communications providers," Kaspersky Lab said.
Average attack lasted for about an hour, the longest - almost 12 hours. Some banks have been attacked several times - Kaspersky Lab registered a series of 2 to 4 attacks with a short interval, with 660,000 requests per second on average, which is not the limit.
According to the company, the latest large-scale series of attacks happened in October 2015, when 8 well-known Russian banks were attacked.