Russia’s largest bank suffers worst DDoS attack
- The head of Sberbank security said that there has been a structural shift in Russian cybersecurity, with an explosion in cyber attacks on businesses over the past three months and a significant increase in strength.
- Putin said Russia is suffering from an “information space war”, he proposed three key tasks to ensure the security of Russia’s critical information infrastructure.
- On May 19, the official website of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank (Federal Savings Bank) revealed that on May 6 it successfully repelled the largest DDoS attack ever, with peak traffic of 450 GB/sec.
The following day, Vladimir Putin held a meeting on security in the Russian Federation, saying that it was experiencing an “information space war”. He proposed three key tasks to ensure the security of Russia’s critical information infrastructure.
Sberbank hit by the worst DDoS attack
The malicious traffic that attacked Sberbank’s main website was generated by a botnet containing 27,000 infected devices from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Taiwan, China.
Cybercriminals use a variety of tactics to execute cyberattacks, including injecting code into ad scripts, malicious Chrome extensions, and Docker containers weaponized by DDoS tools, according to Sergei Lebed, vice president and head of cybersecurity at Sberbank.
Lebed said they have detected more than 100,000 cybercriminals launching attacks against them in the past few months. In March alone, they recorded 46 simultaneous attack campaigns against different Sberbank services, with a significant portion of the attacks leveraging traffic from online streaming and viewing sites.
The tactics are similar to those used by pro-Russian hacking groups to attack major Ukrainian websites. Once someone visits one of these infected sites, the user’s web browser is injected with specially crafted code from a malicious script, which sends a large number of requests to the attacked URL. In the case of this attack, it was naturally directed to various URLs under the Sberbank domain.
Lebed said, “Currently, Sberbank is still under 24/7 cyber attack. Our Security Operations Center is also on call 24/7 to analyze cyber threats and react quickly.”
Lebed warned that “once the offensive spreads to other companies in the industry, they are likely to suffer losses as most of them have never experienced this type of cyber shock before.”
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Putin says he is experiencing an “information space war” and proposes three key tasks to guarantee it
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia has suffered a series of cyberattacks launched by the Western world during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but all have been successfully defused.
Addressing members of Russia’s Security Council last Friday, May 20, Putin noted that “challenges in this area are becoming more urgent, serious and widespread.”
He charged that “Russia is experiencing an outright aggression, a war that has erupted in the information sphere.”
Putin added that “this cyber attack against us, like all the sanctions against Russia, has failed.”
He asked officials at all levels to “improve and strengthen the mechanism for securing the information security of major industrial facilities directly related to Russia’s defense capabilities and the stable development of the economic and social sphere.”
For the draft basic principles of state policy to ensure the security of Russia’s critical information infrastructure discussed at the meeting, Putin proposed three key tasks.
The first is to continuously improve and adjust the mechanism for securing information in the area of key facilities directly related to defense capabilities and stable economic and social development.
The second is to improve the security of information systems and communication networks of state institutions. “The inspection conducted in 2021 showed that most of the resources operating there are vulnerable to external large-scale attacks and disruptive influences, especially with the latest generation of foreign technology components.” It is necessary to strengthen the defense of the domestic digital space and reduce the risk of leakage of citizens’ information and personal data. He proposed a discussion on the establishment of a national information protection system, doing a great job in data protection.
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Third, the risks associated with the adoption of foreign programs, computer technologies, and telecommunications equipment should be radically reduced. He noted that the process of digitization of the public administration system and the economic sphere promoted by Russia in recent years should be protected as much as possible from any potential negative external influences, “and the way to accomplish this task is obviously to turn to domestically produced equipment, technologies, programs, and products.”
Not only the government but also enterprises need to pay more attention to data protection. Nowadays, a lot of software do data protection well, and we can find many ways to protect our data such as VMware backup, oVirt Backup, and so on.
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