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Russian Foreign Ministry’s site repels regular DDoS attacks carried out from US

The botnets infected with malware have amounted to 88% of the visits, Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said

© Sergei Konkov/TASS

MOSCOW, April 12. /TASS/. Distributed denial of service (or DDoS) attacks regularly hit the Russian Foreign Ministry’s site and are carried out from IP addresses in the United States, Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

"For many months, we have been listening to accusations against Russia of hacking. Nonetheless, there has been no evidence to this," Zakharova said. "The allegations are made in the style of UK’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson: ‘We have no evidence’ but we are convinced they ‘(the Russians) are capable of doing that’."

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Diplomat: US needs alleged attack on Russian ministry website to hype up cyberwar topic

"Unlike our Western counterparts, we have (the evidence) to present," the diplomat said.

"Nowadays, we are facing this regularly. I am speaking on behalf of Russia’s Foreign Ministry’s website but the sites of other agencies are hit by attacks as well," Zakharova said. "According to experts’ data, the site of the Foreign Ministry comes under regular DDoS attacks carried out from IP addresses located in the United States."

"This February, there were three attacks but in March so-called botnets, infected with malware, intensified their activity from the US to knock out the ministry’s site. Their share amounted to 88% of all visits."

Zakharova said that 1.7 million people from the United States visited the site. Meanwhile, she said that she did not mean "the visits made by average customers but a set of actions usually called hacker attacks."

US’ assistance against hacking

"We urge our Western counterparts to resume multilateral, genuine cooperation aimed at stopping malicious activities of hackers, the people who have become one of the major destabilizing forces nowadays," Zakharova said. "We would advise that instead of knocking out the Russian Foreign Ministry’s site, they should channel their energy in a peaceful direction and do utmost to join efforts in the fight against cyber threats."

"We will be following the statistics data in the future. These are real figures that the US relevant agencies could deal with," the Russian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman said. "We provide them with a chance today to start looking into how the hackers, who are unscrupulous in using Internet technology and who are registered within the United States, behave.".

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