Russian firms are being bombarded with DDoS attacks
>
While the Russian military bombed Ukraine, Russian businesses at home were bombed with Distributed Denial of Service (opens in new tab) (DDoS) attacks – with such incidents against Russian entities reaching new highs in 2022.
Figures from Rostelecom, Russia’s largest internet provider, claim that by 2022, 21.5 million DDoS attacks will have been carried out against some 600 organizations in the country.
Most of the attacks took place in and around Moscow, where most of these companies are headquartered. None of the larger sectors appear to have been spared, with companies in telecoms, retail, finance and the public sector all facing attacks.
Attack on the public sector
The public sector was the most targeted, with almost a third (30%) of all incidents (12x more than a year earlier). Financial institutions accounted for a quarter of all attacks (25%), followed by education (16%).
The largest attack was 760 GB/s, Rostelecom said further, claiming that the destructive power was almost doubled compared to last year’s largest attack. However, the longest attack lasted nearly three months.
Most of the attacks began in March, coinciding with the invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24. The attacks culminated in May, the company later said. Based on the IP addresses used, the company concluded that most of the attacks originated in the United States.
While DDoS attacks made up the vast majority of all attacks (about 80%), there were also other types of cyberattacks. Vulnerable websites were also on the radar of Western hackers, who exploited the flaws to perform arbitrary command execution attacks (10%), path traversal (4%), local file capture (3%), SQL injection (3%), and perform crossover attacks. site scripting (1%).
Since the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, hackers and hacktivists have entered the fray from all sides and have been quite active.
Among them was Conti, one of the largest ransomware operators, who enraged his affiliates (mainly Ukrainians) after openly siding with the Russian government. Conti later backtracked on his statement, but the damage was already done, with a hacker deciding to leak multiple source code versions, as well as hundreds of thousands of chat lines between its members.
Through: Beeping computer (opens in new tab)