For the first time massive DDoS attacks hit Russian banks in 2016

A number of prolonged DDoS attacks hit at least five Russian banks this week and experts suspect the involvement of the Mirai Botnet once again.

A wave of DDoS attacks hit at least five Russian banks with prolonged DDoS attacks this week.

Among the victims of the DDoS attacks against the online banking services there are Sberbank and Alfabank banks.

The string of DDoS attacks began on Tuesday afternoon and lasted over two days.

“At least five Russian major banks came under a continuous hacker attack, although online client services were not disrupted. The attack came from a wide-scale botnet involving at least 24,000 computers, located in 30 countries.” reads RT.com.

“The attack began Tuesday afternoon, and continued for two days straight, according to a source close to Russia’s Central Bank quoted by RIA Novosti. Sberbank confirmed the DDoS attack on its online services.”

“The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries,”Sberbank’s press service told RIA.

According to an unnamed Russian Central Bank, official the attackers used a botnet of IoT devices, likely a Mirai botnet. The Mirai botnet is the same threat that targeted the Dyn DNS service causing the Internet outage for a large portion of the US netizens.

Both Sberbank and Alfabank have confirmed the DDoS attacks against their systems, but Alfabank downplayed the incident classifying the attack as a “weak” one.

“We registered a first attack early in the morning … the next attack in the evening involved several waves, each of them was twice as powerful as the previous one. Bank’s cybersecurity noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services,” Sberbank representative said.

“There was an attack, but it was relatively weak. It did not affect Alfabank’s business systems in any way,” the bank told RIA Novosti.

According to the experts from Kaspersky Lab, this is the first time that massive DDoS attacks hit Russian banks this year.

A previous string of DDoS attacks against banks was observed in October 2015.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – DDoS attacks, Russia)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.