DDoS Attacks on 5 Major Russian Financial Institutions Thwarted

Russia's Rostelecom telecommunications provider repelled large-scale DDoS attacks on the country's five major banks and financial institutions on December 5, the company's press service said in a Friday statement.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) warned last week that foreign intelligence services planned cyberattacks on the financial sector in several dozen Russian cities from a Ukrainian hosting company's servers located in the Netherlands. The attacks were said to start December 5.

"Rostelecom has successfully thwarted DDoS attacks on five biggest banks and financial institutions of Russia. The repulsed attacks were of the same type, TCP SYN Flood. The peak volume of packets [hitting the banks' networks] was 3.2 million of packets per second. The longest attack lasted for more than two hours. All the thwarted attacks were registered on December 5, 2016," the statement said.

The statement added citing Muslim Mezhlumov, the director of Rostelecom's cybersecurity center, that part of the traffic used in the attacks had been generated by a botnet created with the use of resources of Internet-connected devices of a number of producers.

According to the statement, the attacks with the use of a similar botnet had been registered during last week in the network of Germany's Deutsche Telecom and Ireland's Eircom.