The largest banks in Russia were subjected to a large-scale DDoS attack

A new large-scale DDoS attack carried out late in the evening on September 2 led to the system failure of major banks and made some of their services unavailable. Thus, a number of large banks experienced problems with payments and card services for some time.

VTB, Sberbank and Alfa-Bank withstood the attack, but their Internet provider Orange Business Services experienced significant difficulties.

“Everything that went through Internet providers, including land points that are connected by wires, ATMs, POS terminals, did not work for some time,” said a bank representative.

“The IT services of our partners and their communication providers faced a DDoS attack, which affected the payment of customers in remote service channels,” VTB reported.

Sberbank reported that on September 2, a failure was recorded on the side of an external service provider, which could lead to short delays in the operation of individual services.

“Some reports recorded by the Downdetector resource could be related to problems with one of the local Internet providers,” Alfa-Bank reported.

Olga Baranova, Operational Director of Orange Business Services in Russia and the CIS, said that since August 9, the company’s cyber threat monitoring center has been recording attacks on financial clients around the clock using capacitive attacks such as Amplification, as well as attacks using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).

“These attacks continue even now. The most powerful one was about 100 Gbps. Moreover, in terms of the number of attacks we detected, this August is comparable to the entire last year,” added she.

As explained by the founder and CEO of Qrator Labs, Alexander Lyamin, Amplification attacks are aimed at communication channels, and HTTPS or Application Layer attacks are aimed directly at applications. “DDoS attacks of this type are the most dangerous: they are difficult to detect and neutralize since they can simulate legitimate traffic,” noted he.