Massive cyber attack hit top 5 Russian banks: Report

A massive cyber attack hit top five Russian banks this week, global internet security giant Kaspersky reported on Friday, adding that these attacks were still going on.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack began on Tuesday and targeted "the websites of at least five well-known financial institutions in the top 10" in Russia, according to a statement released by Moscow-based Kaspersky to Taiwannews.com.

DDoS attacks attempt to cripple machines or network resources by flooding them with requests from multiple IP addresses.

Taiwan, the US, India and Israel accounted for more than half of the attacks.

From more than 24,000 hijacked devices located in 30 countries, 666,000 requests were being sent per second using botnet.

Botnet is a network of private computers that are infected with malicious software and controlled as an aggregate without the owner knowing about it.

"These attacks were still ongoing as of Thursday, with most lasting around an hour, but the longest continuing for up to 12 hours," the Kaspersky statement read.

A similar attack on October 21, using the botnet from 100,000 hijacked devices, hit the major DNS service provider Dyn in the US.

"The attacks are conducted from botnets, consisting of tens of thousands computers, which are located in tens of countries. We registered the 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 cyber-security noticed and located the attack in time. There have been no problems in client online services," read the statement of Sberbank, one of the affected banks.

In October, the US government accused Russia of waging a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organisations before the November 8 election.

--IANS

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