While the Russian military bombed Ukraine domestically, Russian businesses were bombarded with diffuse denial of service (opens in a new tab) Attacks (DDoS) – such incidents on Russian entities reached new highs in 2022.
Data from Rostelecom, the largest ISP in Russia, says that in 2022, 21.5 million DDoS attacks were carried out in the country against about 600 organizations.
Most of the attacks took place in and around Moscow, where most of these companies are headquartered. No major sector appears to have been spared, with telecommunications, retail, finance and the public sector companies all hit.
Attack on the public sector
The public sector was the most attacked, accounting for almost a third (30%) of all incidents (up 12-fold year-over-year). Financial institutions accounted for a quarter of all attacks (25%), followed by education (16%).
The biggest attack had a speed of 760 GB/sec. The longest attack, however, lasted almost three months.
Most of the attacks began in March, coinciding with the invasion of Ukraine that began on February 24. The attacks culminated in May, the company later said. Based on the IP addresses used, the company concluded that the United States was the source of most of the attacks.
Although DDoS attacks accounted for the vast majority of all attacks (around 80%), there were also other types of cyberattacks. Vulnerable websites have also come under the radar of Western hackers who have exploited these vulnerabilities to conduct arbitrary command (10%), path traverse (4%), local file attachment (3%), SQL injection (3%) ) and cross-site scripting (1%).
Since the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, hackers and hacktivists from all sides have entered the fray and have been quite active.
Among them was Conti, one of the largest ransomware operators, who infuriated his partners (mainly Ukrainians) after openly siding with the Russian government. Conti later retracted his statement, but the damage had already been done, and one hacker decided to reveal multiple versions of the source code, as well as hundreds of thousands of chat lines between its members.
Through: Beeping Computer (opens in a new tab)